ENG120 Faculty Resources

Possible Ways to Use TruthQuest 

1. Assign TruthQuest! in its entirety to your students as homework outside class.

• Have students share/show their completed posters and discuss as a group. (See discussion questions below by section)

2. Assign TruthQuest! by sections

• Assign Home, Step One and Step Two while you work on Narratives in your curriculum
  • Ask students to read the "fact checking" articles/sources beneath the memes and discuss the satire being used in them
  • Ask students to create their own memes depicting their views on gun violence
  • Ask students to share the "missing" voice they chose to include on their poster, and why they chose that voice. Whose perspective is not being heard in the gun violence discussion? Why is that voice not heard?
  • When policy decisions about "gun control" or "gun rights" are made, which voices/perspectives will be considered? Which will not? Why?
• Assign Step Three when you work on Analysis in your curriculum
  • Talk about the Media Bias Chart - read/view/discuss Ad Fontes Media's work
  • Discuss their discoveries looking up articles from sources from the various columns (liberal, neutral, conservative) -
    • Similarities, differences?
    • Review the steps of SIFT. See Mike Caulfield's work on "4 moves and a habit."
    • Which do you "trust"? Did this change your thinking at all? If so, how?
  • Watch the Eli Pariser video clip together in class. What does it mean? Is Google making choices FOR you when you search? Why? Is this helpful or not? How might Google’s algorithms entrench users’ biases?
• Assign Step Four & Step 5 when you work on Research in your curriculum
  • Watch the Library Orientation video together in class or assign as homework
  • Discuss the articles the students chose to show in their poster assignment. Why did they choose that article? Which criteria did they use to select it? How will those criteria be used when they conduct searches for their research paper assignment?
  • Ask them to search for "gun violence" and look at their results and then list pros and cons for each of the 4 databases in the Database Playground in Step Five. What strengths do each have (newspapers, videos, statistics, controversial topics databases)? How might they be used for their own research topics?
• Assign Step Six and "You Did It" after they have begun researching their own topics
  • Share their posters.
  • Discuss their "takeaway" images and captions. 
  • Which pieces they learned will help them with their ENG120 final project and with their other subjects?

3. Work on TruthQuest during class either in a whole class (with individual work outside class) or in increments during different class sessions. (If using TruthQuest in class in a self-paced fashion, encourage individual students to use the closed captioning button while watching videos, OR wear earbuds, to avoid disturbing each others' concentration.)

4. Use the TruthQuest! Rubric below to evaluate student learning exhibited through the infographic generated at the end of the TruthQuest! process.