Great question, Elizabeth – and a very pertinent article to share, thank you.
I rather think that the proactive approach suggested in the article may be too abstract, too advanced and not sufficiently structured for most of our students. The Framework for Information Literacy which gets a mention in the article is intended for Higher Education – and even there not all students appreciate or even want to know how knowledge is built; I think Doug Brent’s Senior Students’ Perceptions of Entering a Research Community holds true.
Which is not to say that aspects cannot filter down into secondary and primary education, in age-appropriate ways. They should and they do – especially schools which are inquiry-led, learner-focused.
While I agree that CRAAP and CARDS and ACCORD and ABCD and similar evaluation tools may be too simplistic and unhelpful, I would not give up on SIFT just yet – and nor do the authors of the article, their proactive strategy is built upon SIFT, “Building on SIFT strategies,.. ” they say, and this is very possible, even at our levels of education.
A huge element of SIFT is lateral reading – seeing what others say about the article, following up the sources used (and seeing what others say about these sources, looking for accuracy, looking for bias or vested interest), looking for what is not there as well as what s there, eventually going to The Source.
I wonder what our students will make of the May/June 2021 edition of The American Journal of Health Behavior, bought up by JUUL to promote research into electronic smoking; JUUL just happens to be one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of e-smoking devices so might just have a vested interest; there are also questions to be asked about a journal which allows itself to be bought up, even for just one issue.
One advantage of acronyms is that they make for a set of easy-to-remember strategies and help ensure that we remember to cover all the bases. Perhaps what we need is not something better than SIFT (or even CRAAP etc) but a better and maybe deeper set of questions to ask as we pursue each element of our chosen evaluation tool?
John