Evaluating resources
Let's say you have to write a research paper using at least one book and one scholarly article published
within the last five years on the topic of "How is artificial intelligence changing education?" Let's
imagine you also searched Page 1 + using the keywords "artificial intelligence" and "education" and you
found two potentially good resources.
The first one is this electronic book "The fourth education revolution: Will artificial intelligence
liberate or infantilize humanity". To evaluate whether or not it's good for your topic, ask yourself the
following five questions.
So one, does the source include my keywords in the title and subject headings? We can see that education
and artificial intelligence show up in the title for the book. Let's scroll down and look at the subject
headings and we only see artificial intelligence. We don't see education. That's okay for now - we're
not going to be worried at this point because we have other questions to answer.
Question 2 - is the source published in the required timeframe? We can see that this book was published
in 2020 so that's within the last 5 years and that's good.
Question 3 - does the type of my resource meet the assignment requirements? Is a scholarly? Let's see if
we can figure out if this item is a scholarly book. I'm going to scroll down to the item details and I
can see that the publisher is the University of Buckingham Press. Usually a university press is
considered a scholarly publisher. So the answer to that question is yes.
Question 4 - does the abstract or table of contents reflect what I need to answer my research question?
So the description for this book isn't very helpful so I'm going to go to the actual book. I'm going to
link out and I'm going to see a larger description here and as I scroll down I'm also going to see the
table of contents.
So I can see that there are definitely ones that are talking about education specifically education 4.0.
And if I scroll up and look at the description, here we are talking about the role of artificial
intelligence and its impact on education.
So I think that is a good description. The final question to ask is, is the source useful for my
assignment? Based on all of the information, I think that this will be a good source that we can use.
Notice that what we are doing is a lot of critical thinking and reviewing the information to determine
whether or not we want to use the resource.
Now here's the second resource to evaluate. It is identified as an article. And now the first thing I
want to look, are the words "artificial intelligence" and "education" listed in the title and in the
subjects.
Artificial intelligence is certainly in the title of the article. I'm going to scroll down to the
subjects and here I can see "college students", I can see "educational technology", "higher education" -
so it's kind of there.
Looking at when it was published - 2021 - that's definitely within the five-year time span so the answer
to that question is yes. Is this a scholarly article? Well we can see that it has identified that the
journal is peer reviewed which typically identifies scholarly.
And when we look at the source "International Journal of educational technology in higher education",
From the title of the journal and the fact that it is a journal, we can typically say that yes, this is
a scholarly resource.
Next we need to look at the description for this article to see whether or not it will support the
research question. We can look through here, we can say that AI offers effective support for online
learning and teaching. What else can we find in here?
We've got impact on student satisfaction and learning outcomes. Is there anything else in here that might
identify that it's useful. Contributions of the study include the design of AI system storyboards that
positively support learner instructor interaction capturing students and instructors concerns etc.
Based on that, the description seems to be describing some of the impacts that artificial intelligence
can have in a particular circumstance of education. So given all of the answers to my questions I think
I can potentially use this source as well.
Select a database to link to the full text. If you decide to use it, you can e-mail or print. And
remember to cite your article. This will be covered in the next video.