The Current Assignment: Use our course guide and the INSTRUCTIONS to write and finalize a report before Tuesday, October 20.
Format: Your report can be an addendum to the original draft, or it can be completed with Google Comments.
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Purpose: Your report must show where the draft needs a correction, an in-text citation, a better source, or better source information.
I also encourage you to provide any feedback that you think would help your classmate’s final draft, but that isn’t the main goal of this assignment.
Also, you may want to try an online quiz we took in class on September 29 when we reviewed this assignment. The Pew Center Quiz can help you make sure you are clear on how to differentiate fact from opinion.
Grade:
Each step of this assignment is worth one-third of this assignment’s grade.
Clear details on how you completed each step and what you found are required for full credit in each category of the rubric.
Submission: You must submit the fact check to Bb for grading and share it on the blog with the category “Peer Review 1.”
If you do not want the original author to see your full peer review, you can simply provide general feedback on the draft in the blog, but you must still submit the full fact check in Bb.
Examples: Some students have preferred to write their fact-checks and source evaluations as a report, others prefer to use document comments for the fact-check.
In addition to the attached examples, feel free to review student submissions from previous semesters.
Be sure to review the full instructions linked at the top of this post.
Hello Dr. Loggins, I have looked through this blog and blackboard and still cannot find the name of the knowledge paper that I need to fact check. Some assistance is greatly appreciated.
I also have no clue what paper I am suppose to fact check? I feel like with each passing week in this class I get more and more confused.
Hi Chris,
I emailed you and Kerisa on September 29. She’ll review your paper, and you should review hers.
Please send me an email whenever you feel a little confused by anything. Let me know what I can clarify, and I am happy to do so.
These midterm meetings are also great to clarify everything. I would guess that my office hours may not suit you for a Zoom meeting. But, if that’s the case, just email me and suggest a few times over the week or on the weekend that can.
–Loggins
In light of the conversations we’ve had over Zoom, I want to emphasize the purpose of this assignment and make some suggestions related to how you tackle it.
First of all, you are not expected to confirm ALL the information in your classmate’s paper. Instead, you are more of a fact-checker than a fact finder. By that, I mean it is each student’s responsibility to ensure his or her paper is accurate and clear, with all information cited appropriately. It is the reviewer’s responsibility to help you along if it isn’t, not to do that work for you.
With this in mind, I suggest tackling this assignment in the following way. You can review the steps here, or go to a Google Doc, where the formatting makes the information easier to review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rAtaA9qrCqYuFu5LtezF6L0Gzg6fWXlMs9KOln6Armg/edit?usp=sharing
1. Note all facts & opinions
2. Among the facts, note which have citations and which don’t.
3. Among those that don’t, consider whether the information likely came from a source in the reference list.
4. To start with, check the facts that are appropriately cited.
4a. When you go to the citation, can you find the information relatively easily?
4b. If you can, note where in the source you found the information the author is referring to.
4c. If you can’t just note that it is not in the source and move on.
5. Once you’ve checked cited sources, look for facts that are probably cited in the references but not clearly cited in the text.
5a. If you can quickly and easily find them in the references cited at the end of the paper, great! Again, let us know where you found the information.
5b. If you can’t find it in the first source you find, move on and make a note of that for yourself.
6. If you still have facts that are not cited or not clearly cited, choose five to confirm.
6a. Use the encyclopedia databases or controversial issues databases listed in the Journalism Course Guide at the Forsyth Library website OR use likely sources cited at the end of the paper to confirm or dispute those five facts.
6b. If you spend a few minutes and check one or two likely sources and find nothing to support a fact, make s note of where you looked and that you didn’t find support for this fact and move on.
7. Once you’ve checked all the facts, or checked most and checked five poorly or not-cited facts, remember to evaluate the sources the original author used.
7a. Since the draft requires each paper to have at least five resources, hopefully your classmate had at least five.
7b. If the paper you are reviewing only had three listed sources, evaluate those sources. Remember to discuss which evaluation method you use, why you’re are using it, what you decide at each stage of the evaluation, and what your overall evaluation was for each source once complete.
If you still have questions or concerns, let me know.