CILN Framework 5 Thing 3: Critical Assessment

CN: discussion of anxiety disorder and CBT techniques.

Following on from Part 2, Beth Walters takes on the third task set by the Cambridge Information Literacy Network ‘Framework Five‘ programme which looks at critical assessment.

Critical assessment: making judgments about information and understanding how those judgments can be affected by levels of expertise and influenced by others who similarly create, select and curate information. 

Personal: critically assessing the information your own brain gives you 

For someone who lives with an anxiety disorder, one of the most popular methods of treatment – CBT – aims to offer patients a toolkit for critically assessing the information their brain under the influence of anxiety gives them. The modes of critical assessment CBT or other talking therapies offer a patient often use a controlled vocabulary and exercises to go through and evaluate the ‘information’ an anxious brain gives an individual.  

When learning about critical assessment for this task, I was really interested to see outlined all the ways in which humans are really quite bad at critically assessing – this is definitely something that becomes apparent when someone is trying to de-escalate a panicked situation or thought pattern.  

Evaluating my own experience of deploying these techniques, it’s interesting to see parallels with noted trends in fake news. For example, ‘decoding the work of writers whose track records of faulty reporting are occasionally interrupted by stories that are actually true’ (Swaine, 2017) can also apply to evaluating your own thoughts. A brain affected by anxiety will likely be a brain that at other times, offers reliable and sensible input – telling you to eat and sleep, co-ordinating movement and recalling memories to mention just a few. So, it does make sense that when an anxious brain screams inaccurate information at you, you might be inclined to listen. This is where the evaluation, which is just critical assessment by another name, of those thoughts becomes important. You are asked to assess if you are ‘catastrophising’, what the ‘worst’ outcome is really likely to be and whether the information is based on any reliable evidence or sources. Although the first two aren’t helpful in an academic research scenario (they could perhaps be substituted with methodology evaluation questions), the latter is pretty indistinguishable to questions we might ask of information we’re evaluating.  

A case study for this was handily provided to me by the COVID-19 outbreak. A global pandemic is likely to cause anxiety for anyone – so critical assessment actually became vital as individuals had to assess their own risk factors, information sources and emotional responses. For me, the information sources and emotional responses were quite interlinked – a deluge of information being delivered near constantly put my brain into an overwhelmed state and made it nearly impossible to then tease out information that was immediately relevant and reliable. In this situation I pared back the information I was receiving, sometimes asking for a trusted family member to convey fragments of the news they deemed to be relevant. This proved to be a great, non-inflammatory way to curb my overwhelm, at which point I could select a reliable news source to received limited updates from. I didn’t realise it until doing this exercise, but these were all critical assessment methods, from reducing the initial overwhelm of the saturated information ‘marketplace’ to then making decisions about which news sources to follow.  

Professional: upgrading records from home

Although this anecdote may seem entirely unrelated to the personal anecdote, it does have a link in my mind. When we were planning projects to do from home, we decided to undertake a mass-upgrade project to upgrade our oldest, most brief records for our collection. There are tens of thousands of these records, and it is a job that really relies on human critical assessment. Being relatively new to the job and the world of cataloguing and Alma, this was a nice new challenge for me. To make the job simpler for me, I was given instructions to upgrade things that seemed straightforward and had existing, more complete catalogue records within the Alma system.  

The period of working from home the Library entered in response to the COVID-19 situation also meant I was without my usual source of fact checking and reassurance – my colleague. Although the wonders of the internet meant I could stay more or less in constant contact with her, I felt obliged to at least try to increase my knowledge and skills. Thankfully the day before I started working from home, I thought to grab the exhaustive handout given to me on a cataloguing training course I attended in the first few weeks in the job. This meant I could quickly flip through the rules for required information, punctuation and so forth. Although it slowed down the process at first, over time my critical assessment of the records improved. For questions that weren’t easily answered by the handout, I could still ask my colleague!

Overlap?

Both of these situations were a little bit unprecedented, and critical assessment can feel cloudy or difficult especially if there’s an emotional charge to events. However, reaching out and asking for help tie these elements of critical assessment together. Crucially, in doing so it addressed the need for some expert advice and calming any emotional reactions to the point where expert resources and advice can be applied.

One thought on “CILN Framework 5 Thing 3: Critical Assessment

  1. Pingback: CILN Framework 5 - Thing 4: Managing Information - CaTaLOGCaTaLOG

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