Information literacy is the ability to use critical thinking to create meaningful knowledge from information. The information literate student: engages in a process of inquiry in order to frame intellectual challenges and identify research needs; accesses, evaluates, and communicates information effectively; provides attribution for source materials used; develops insight into the social, legal, economic and ethical aspects of information creation, use, access and durability.
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Information Literacy: Syllabus and Assignment Creation
Information Literacy: In-Class Activities
Action:
- When providing critiques orally or in writing, tell students that you have high expectations and believe that they can meet them.
Reason:
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David Kirp in a New York Times article summarized an article by Cohen, Steele, & Ross (1999) “when an English teacher critiqued black male adolescents’ papers, she added a sentence stating that she had high expectations and believed that, if the student worked hard, he could meet her exacting standards. Eighty-eight percent of those students rewrote the assignment and put more effort into rewriting, while just a third of their peers, who were given comments that simply provided feedback, did the same.”
Action:
- Ask students to create an annotated bibliography of 5-8 articles on a particular topic in which
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Each annotation is no more than 100-250 words
- Explains the authors’ views
- Explains how the authors’ views relate to one another
- Explains how the authors’ views relate to the student’s own views
Reason:
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This work can help students synthesize the key literature as they develop their thesis.
Action:
- Pick a sufficiently narrow topic or term and ask students to:
- identify 3 articles that are likely to be relevant to that topic
- list which database(s) they used and why they found those databases appropriate
- list their search terms
- provide the bibliographic information, properly formatted, for all 3 articles
- Build on the former activity by asking students to read and summarize the abstracts of the papers they found during their research process.
- An alternative assignment: after students have written a brief response paper to an issue, text, artwork, etc. ask them to write a second paper, based on their research of the issue/text/artwork, in which they
- choose 2 or 3 sources
- summarize the views in those sources
- properly cite those sources
- and state how their own views are in line with or contrary to the scholarly views.
Reason:
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An assignment that makes the steps of a research process explicit helps students better master these skills.
Action:
Reason:
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This resource can serve as general background allowing the instructor to focus on disciplinary specific aspects of research.
Action:
Reason:
- Rubrics are helpful for both evaluating the display of information literacy in a paper and communicating expectations to students.
Action:
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Enumerate or have students brainstorm ways in which authors establish credibility. For example,
Referencing a broad range of scholarly articles about a topic.
Referencing seminal works within a domain.
References scholarly rather than popular or opinion sources.
Presents evidence to support the argument.
Distinguishes between their ideas and the ideas of others.
Reason:
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Understanding the disciplinary ways in which authors establish credibility is important for both evaluating and generating research papers.
Action:
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Increase the font size in your web browser and project your computer screen. Narrate your thought process as you search for and evaluate sources about a particular topic.
- State explicitly the limitations of various search resources within your discipline.
Reason:
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Live demonstrations can be helpful for capturing seemingly inconsequential steps that may confuse or stall students.
Action:
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In oral or written form, ask students to both summarize and critique a source. Ask students to separate their summary and critique.
Reason:
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Separating their summary and critique can help illustrate the differences in content and structure.
Action:
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For a given source, direct students to ask and answer:
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Who produced the information?
- Who could benefit from the dissemination of this information?
- What perspective is not represented?
- Does the information support or challenge established understandings of the issue?
Reason:
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Identifying biased and non-authoritative sources requires knowledge of the domain. Providing a concrete set of questions can help students more efficiently identify biased and non-authoritative sources.
Action:
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Provide students a paper that does a good job of making claims that are supported by cited evidence. Either in class or in a written assignment, ask students to summarize the arguments made within the paper and what cited evidence the authors used to make each argument.
- Ask students to identify the following:
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Text that situates this question within the literature
- Cited evidence
- Explanations of how the cited evidence supports a specific claim.
- When possible, use a previous student’s anonymized assignment as a model for current students.
Reason:
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Deconstructing examples of how authors construct an argument through citing previous work provides students a model of how to connect existing literature to their topic.
