Life-long Skill
For information literacy to be a transferable and life-long skill, students must see the link and applicability of information literacy to their other classes. Incorporating information literacy into your class need not require an entire overhaul or re-working of your syllabus. It can be as simple as modifying an existing assignment or adding an additional outcome to your course goals. Below are links to some ideas and practices from colleges across the country. For further assistance, please feel free to contact Diane Zwemer.
What If a Term Paper is Not Appropriate for My Class?
The standard research or term paper is just one of many ways to incorporate information-based assignments into a course. Here are a few examples of alternatives.
From Lawrence University
"Have the students find a study in a popular magazine and then have them find the actual study or have the student investigate a media topic back to the source or have the student choose an autobiography and then locate secondary sources."
See more at http://www.lawrence.edu/library/instruct/alternatives.shtml.
From Nichols College
"Examine Coverage of a Controversial Issue
Assignment: Examine the treatment of a controversial issue in several sources [newspaper editorial, scholarly journal, journals from different disciplines, etc.].
Purpose: Emphasizes that there are multiple perspectives on any issue."
See more at http://www.nichols.edu/library/libalternatives.htm.
From Drew University
"Successful information-based assignments:
- encourage students to think about the type of information they need (factual, background, evaluative), and the form in which they're most likely to find it
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- include retrieval of information through some finding tool such as an index, catalog, database or search engine
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- ask students to look at information critically -- to evaluate it, to compare it with other information, to synthesize information from different sources, to identify the most crucial pieces of information available"
See more at: http://www.users.drew.edu/~jcaldwel/assign.html.
From Buena Vista University
Buena Vista’s website, Ideas for Incorporating Research into FYS Courses, has an extensive list of ideas and examples for each of these four goals:
"1. Using print and electronic information retrieval systems, students will be able to obtain appropriate periodicals and/or monographs.
2. Evaluate the validity and importance of information in both print and electronic formats, and be able to distinguish between scholarly and popular publications.
3. Know when and how to use the Internet appropriately in research.
4. Know how to appropriately attribute an information resource using a standard/accepted citation method."
See more at: http://www.bvu.edu/departments/academicaffairs/library/faculty_support.html#ideas
Read More About It:
Fosmire, Michael and Macklin, Alexius. "Riding the Active Learning Wave: Problem-Based Learning as a
Catalyst for Creating Faculty-Librarian Instructional Partnerships." Issues in Science and Technology
Librarianship. 34 (Spring 2002): xx. 17 May 2007 <http://www.istl.org/02-spring/article2.html>.