Author Contact Information
- Mary C. ThillMary Thill is the Humanities Librarian and Reference Coordinator at the Ronald Williams Library, and a Professor on the library faculty, at Northeastern Illinois University.
- Frank LambertFrank Lambert is the Program Coordinator for the Master in Library Science degree program, and an Associate Professor in the College of Education, at Middle Tennessee State University.
- James W. RosenzweigJames Rosenzweig is the Education & Children's Studies Librarian at the John F. Kennedy Library, and a Professor on the library faculty, at Eastern Washington University.
Welcome!
Welcome to our guide, which shares a wide array of materials and resources connected with The WHY Method, an updated approach to source evaluation for students in K-12 schools and in college/university coursework.
On the left you'll see tabs that lead to other pages: Instructional Materials, providing instructional handouts and other materials for using The WHY Method with middle school, high school, and college students; Assessment Materials, providing the more detailed research version of our taxonomy; and Publications & Presentations, with links to presentations and other publications connected with the method.
Please explore freely, and be sure to contact any of us if you have questions about our work!
Quick Links
- The WHY Method (for high school and college students)A handout on our source evaluation approach -- "The WHY Method" -- that's suitable for distribution in the high school or college classroom. It's free to reuse (it's released under the CC BY-NC-SA license). More instructional materials are available on the subpage (use the left navigation bar).
- The WHY Method (for middle school students)A handout on our source evaluation approach -- "The WHY Method" -- that's suitable for distribution in the middle school classroom. It's free to reuse (it's released under the CC BY-NC-SA license) and we hope you find it helpful!
- Making Sense of Student Source Selection: Using the WHY Method to Analyze Authority in Student Research Bibliographies, by Lambert, Thill and RosenzweigOur first publication of data from the multi-institution study applying The WHY Method: more publication/presentation links are available on the subpage (use the left navigation bar).
CC BY-NC-SA
Many of the materials shared in this guide are released under the CC BY-NC-SA License, meaning:
- Reusing/editing/transforming these materials is fine--even encouraged!
- You can use this work for non-commercial purposes only.
- You must credit the authors.
- You must share your materials under the same license.
We hope to build a community of practice around The WHY Method, in which librarians and educators share resources and approaches very freely. If you create documents of your own based on The WHY Method that you'd like to share, we hope you'll contact us so that they can be added to this guide!