ABSTRACT
This chapter is about a fourth grade teacher, Rindi, and her students in an international school in Singapore wrestling with the challenge of locating reliable, readable, and useful sources about threats to tropical rainforests and their inhabitants. (Rindi initially used the term “trustworthy” because she thought her nine-year-old students could relate to the idea of trust, but she used trustworthy and reliable interchangeably.) As part of an interdisciplinary social studies and science unit, Rindi developed a research tool with her students to help them become more discerning in their use of information sources to investigate a complex, multifaceted problem. Helping students locate good information sources is increasingly challenging due to the accelerated growth of networked information, especially the Internet with its varied text structures and formats (Coiro, 2003). Determining which sources to select, which to trust, and which to avoid is essential in an age of information, especially when criteria for selecting sources of information seems to be in short supply (Alvermann, Swafford, & Montero, 2004).
