Evaluation is a skill in which many students get little practice or guidance. Yet it stands at the highest thinking level of Bloom's Taxonomy. When these forms of evaluation are regularly incorporated within information literacy activities, student thinking levels are upgraded.
Students become aware of how their decisions affect inquiry results.
That focuses students on their power to affect successful solutions, and the needs they have to improve that power. Full ownership involves students valuing their abilities to solve information problems for their own needs. Incorporating student choices and self-evaluation does not suggest chaos in the library or educators relinquishing their role. Not when assignments insure significant decisions that are worth evaluating, and when students are trained to inspect their own decision-making. On the flip side, patronizing, pro-forma treatment of these valued skills invites superficiality with its lack of honest scrutiny.