By Shelly Jarenski and Patrick Beauchesne
What is Curate and SIFT?
In the Fall of 2024, the Foundations program at UM-Dearborn introduced a Common Assignment, designed to be taught across all courses in the program. The Foundations program’s goal is to teach all first year or transfer students the core skills they will need to succeed at our university and to introduce students to campus resources and programs that will help support them in that endeavor. Introducing a common assignment across all Foundations courses creates a partnership between students and faculty, but also partnerships amongst students themselves. Common assignments allow students to connect and collaborate with peers in their courses and across courses, since students will have a similar experience even in different contexts. With Curate and SIFT in particular, the way the assignment is designed promotes student agency and engagement, embedding student and faculty partnership into the fabric of the assignment.
Students as Partners
The Curate and SIFT is an assignment based on this method and was designed by Autumm Caines (an instructional designer from the HUB) and Anne Dempsey (a librarian at the Mardigian Library). Not only does this assignment teach web literacy and the SIFT method, it also makes students our partners because they control the material that comes into the course through this assignment. A critical part of this curate and SIFT approach is the curation component. How do we decide what sources will be verified, what sources we will try the SIFT method out on? We ask students to find the sources they want to explore, to bring in the material from their own media and social media environment that they are interested in learning about. This creates a high level of student agency and cooperation between the instructor and the student; there would be no material for curate and SIFT without student curation efforts. After students curate the material, the instructor asks the student’s peers to perform the SIFT method on the provided sources. Curate creates a high level of student and faculty engagement, performing SIFT on examples they know were provided by other students creates a high level of engagement among students.
We included students as partners in the ways we described above in the initial design and first round of instruction of curate and SIFT, but there are avenues we could envision for future iterations of the assignment. One potential layer that could be added are class discussions that act like debriefs/reflections/post-mortems where the whole class applies some meta-cognition to the work they did. Through this process, the students and faculty could identify particular pain-points or problems that students might encounter as they do this assignment. This could lead to a refinement of any guides or introductions to the assignment for future courses. It is also worth spending some time reflecting on what was learned, and to reinforce the need to be very cautious before trusting information. We also anticipate that these kinds of reflections might help improve the speed and quality of applying the SIFT method for students, as they may come across tips and tricks they didn’t know about when students report out and share their own individual strategies. I (Patrick) will be applying this kind of reflection in my current Foundations course this semester, and I suspect it will be a very productive conversation!
What do we (Patrick and Shelly) think about this assignment?
Students, and faculty as well, face an informational landscape that is deeply challenging. This reality is a complex one with many potential avenues for intervention. One of the reasons we were drawn to the SIFT method was because it offered relatively simple, clear and actionable pathways to help students cut through some of the ambiguity and of the overload of information they face on a daily basis. SIFT helps students reduce uncertainty by giving them a process to follow that gradually helps develop a healthy sense of skepticism, while also encouraging trust when some basic facts have been verified. It’s a way to help reduce decision paralysis (Do I believe this or not? Is this fake news? Can I trust this?) and feel a bit more secure in an uncertain and confusing media landscape. We were drawn to the curate and SIFT assignment because it was so student centered in integral ways.
I (Shelly) can speak from personal experience here because I taught Curate and SIFT in my course this past summer. I have always prided myself on creating spaces for students to engage with one another, I design all of my courses to be based around discussion and not top down lecture. And yet, this assignment in particular was singled out by the students in my course as the one where they engaged the most with one another. Time and time again in students’ evaluations of my course, they cited Curate and SIFT as their favorite activity in the entire course, specifically because, as they said, “it was fun to be able to engage with my peers.”
I (Patrick) feel that the pilot project (Summer 2024) for this assignment was a resounding success. The vast majority of students reported that they not only found the Curate and SIFT assignments useful and interesting, they had fun doing it as well. Part of what makes this assignment so effective is that it works equally well in online courses as it does with in-person ones. It is also flexible, and can be tailored to specific disciplinary topics (for example I am currently using it in my Nutrition and Health course – ANTH 415 to explore the vast array of misinformation about health and nutrition that floods the internet on a daily basis). As we mentioned above, a core component of this assignment is to have students talk to each other throughout this process. This can occur in many ways! I feel that I can take the general framework of this assignment and find interesting and exciting applications in a variety of courses.
What do students think?
We asked students this summer, during our pilot program for this assignment, to reflect on their experiences at the end of the semester. The results surprised! The overwhelming majority of students found these assignments very useful – they could see the continued application of the SIFT process clearly in their daily lives. Most enjoyed the process as well; they had a lot of fun doing this, in no small part because the structure of the assignment encourages student sourced content and peer-to-peer discussion and thinking through this as a group. There was no consistency in whether or not students found it challenging; we saw a roughly equal number of reports in their reflections that the work was difficult, while others said it was rather easy. We suspect this has more to do with where the students are starting from in terms of media literacy than with the design of the assignments. What is very consistent is the feeling from students that this was all worthwhile and that this is something they need in their lives. This was an incredibly common theme in their reflections, further supported by the vast majority of whom said they would continue to use this method beyond the course. To end, we’d like to offer this comment from a student (anonymized for their protection) that encapsulates a lot about why we think this assignment should become part of the Foundations program long-term, and potentially incorporated into other classes where it makes sense:
“I have already started using this method in my personal life. Nobody will ever fully understand the world and its many issues, but the SIFT method helps me navigate through the world of information. It gives me more confidence when speaking on these issues in public, and that leads to more advanced and educated conversations. If people were somehow forced to do the SIFT method, we’d have a much different perception of problems in the world and would most likely respond to them faster. So yes, continue to do this project. It is important.”
