First Year Experience

The second step of this food product report is going to ask you to create an annotated bibliography of five sources related to your selected three components of your food. As a reminder, each annotation should:

• "describe the main argument of the source
• "highlight the part of the source that is relevant to claims you hope to make about the food in your report"
• "explain the methodology used (if a research article) or the approach of the source in general (e.g., investigative journalism, industry data, and so on)"
• "show awareness of the credibility, authority, and relevance of the information provided, being careful about who is writing, when, and why"

This last bullet point directly connects to one way we evaluate sources of information: the CRAAP test. The CRAAP test helps guide us through a process of reviewing different aspects of a source to determine how credible and trustworthy its information is; each letter in the acronym represents an aspect.

As a reminder, your source does not need to "pass" every aspect of the CRAAP test in order for it to still be found credible. In fact, there may be times you may determine that a source is not credible, but may still present important information (a counterargument, a different perspective, an view of how understanding  has changed over time, etc) that still makes it relevant and useful for your project. That being said, for this particular assignment, your sources will need to "pass" the CRAAP test and be credible in order to help make your argument about your food.

For more information about assessing sources, you are invited to consult:

• the FYI page about information evaluation (includes additional questions to ask during the CRAAP test)
• the lateral reading tutorial
• the authority tutorial

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Resources: