Your Something Real project needs facts you can actually stand over when you pitch it. Today you'll learn a 30-second test that stops you repeating nonsense, works on websites, social posts and AI answers, and trains you to notice the moment your gut and the evidence disagree.
Think about the last time you believed something online that turned out to be wrong. Where was it from? A friend's story, a TikTok, an AI assistant, a news headline, a government page? What made you believe it first time round, and what changed your mind? You won't type an answer, just hold the moment in your head for the next 60 minutes.
Four ideas the rest of the lesson rests on.
| Concept | Why it matters | Example |
|---|---|---|
CRAAP test — five quick checks you can run on any source in about 30 seconds:
| A single routine you can run on a website, a social post or an AI reply. Without it you're guessing. | Running CRAAP on a "top 5 apprenticeships" article tells you in one scroll whether it's advice or dressed-up advertising. |
| Source type vs source quality — the type (blog, news, .gov page, AI, TikTok) is not the same as the quality. | A .gov page isn't always right and a blog isn't always wrong. What matters is whether you can check the claim. | A named Irish accountant's blog that links straight to Revenue.ie can beat a 15-year-old official leaflet for a PAYE question. |
| AI hallucination — AI tools make up plausible facts and sound confident about it. | "The AI said so" is never a source. The fact it sounds fluent is the trap. | Ask an AI for a Citizens Information reference number and it may invent one that cannot be found on citizensinformation.ie. |
| Primary source — the original place a claim lives (the Act, the study, the official page). | If you can follow a claim back to its primary source, you know it's real. If you can't, something is missing. | gov.ie's minimum-wage page is a primary source. A blog saying "according to gov.ie…" without a link is not. |
Hold onto those four. The drill that follows is not about getting a correct final answer, it's about noticing where your gut and a 30-second check disagree.
Four moves you'll need during the drill. Glance at this now so you know what to do when you hit one.
| Issue | Solution |
|---|---|
| The site has no visible author or "About" page | That's an Authority failure on its own. Treat the source as low trust until you can name a specific person or organisation responsible for the claim. |
| You can't find a publication or "last updated" date | That's a Currency failure. For anything where date matters (wages, tax rules, legislation, health guidance), treat undated pages as unusable. |
| The AI assistant gives a confident specific number but won't show its source | Ask the AI for its source URL, then open the URL directly in your browser. If the page doesn't exist, or doesn't say what the AI claimed, the "fact" is a hallucination. Never cite the AI itself as the source. |
| A "primary source" the blog links to loads a 404 or unrelated page | Treat the blog's claim as unverified. A broken or mismatched link is the same as no link at all, the chain back to the primary source is broken. |
You'll rank four claim+source pairs by gut first, then run each one through CRAAP, then compare. The goal is to catch where your instinct and the verified verdict disagree.
| # | Claim | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | "A low-fat diet is the best way to stay healthy, avoid butter and full-fat dairy." | A 1998 public health leaflet from an Irish government health service, scanned into a PDF. |
| 2 | "You can claim Medical Expense Tax Relief on orthodontic treatment (braces) through Revenue myAccount." | A personal blog by a named Irish accountant, with direct links to the relevant Revenue.ie guidance pages. |
| 3 | "Irish apprenticeship starting wages rise by exactly 20% every year across every trade." | A polished article on a careers-advice website covered in pop-up ads, no citations, no author name. |
| 4 | "The current Irish minimum wage is €X.XX per hour." (specific figure) | An AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or similar) answering your typed question. |
Open your platform tab below and work through the steps. Record everything in a document called 26_research_page in your Digital_Portfolio folder. You'll keep adding to this document in the Independent Practice that follows.
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