Teaching information literacy skills

Jo AkersFSTL16February 2016

Background: about me

Academic Liaison Librarian for:Communication Media & Culture, English Language & Communication, Religion & Theology, Philosophy, and Sport Coaching & PE at Oxford Brookes University

Background: why teach information literacy?

One of the Brookes graduate attributes is

“To be able to use appropriate technology to search for high quality information; critically to evaluate and engage with the information obtained” (OCSLD, 2015)

Digital and Information Literacy

Theories behind need for information literacy• IAKT “I already know that” (Bell, 2007 et al) BUT

• Gross (2012) “Simply stated, they tend to believe that they have above-average IL skills, when, in fact, an objective test of their ability indicates that they are below proficient in terms of their actual skills”

• Rieh (2016) “students [...] believe that accessing, searching, using and evaluating sources of information are easy tasks that anyone can perform”

Confirmation from some of our students

• From OBU Library satisfaction survey 2015 – suggestions for improvements

“The search tools for searching things online, for example I can't always be specific enough when searching for peer assessed journals”

“Find resources easier. I'm sure the system is easy but often you have to learn it first, it's not just straight forward”

Session for evaluation• First year undergraduates, in week 4, 1 hour training session in

the library. Already seen the group previous week for 1 hour.

• 19 students attended (not exactly the same 19 as the week before)

• Lecturer wasn’t present, but I was instructed to take a register and she had implied heavily that attendance was compulsory – this can help counteract IAKT syndrome.

• Session focused on teaching referencing skills

Methods employed: powerpoint slides

Brief exercise in groups

Demonstration of software

Outcomes – as professed via powerpoint

Outcomes – for my own purposes

• Making them remember ME!

• Making it relevant – both in subject matter and timeliness for their course. This is helped by knowing the title and hand-in date of the assignment.

• Making it student centred (Carbery, 2010)

Bloom’s taxonomy* and IL• Evaluation – being able to appraise and critically evaluate extracted

information (Keene, 2010)• Synthesis –extracting information from those articles to use to back

arguments in own assignment ie using them as evidence• Analysis – finding useful articles pertaining to those

keywords/metaphors• Application – creating a search strategy from those keywords &

metaphors• Comprehension – understanding the assignment, being able to pick out

keywords and use metaphors• Knowledge – the assignment that they’ve been given

*taken from Butcher, 2014

How do the outcomes align?Knowledge

Comprehension

Application

• Recognize different types of references

• Understand the difference between a reference and a bibliography

• Understand the importance of citing your sources

• Understand the benefits of using reference management software such as EndNote

Knowledge

How do the methods align?• Brief exercise in groups

• EndNote software

• Populating EndNote with…

• …useful articles

• Synthesis & evaluation – would come from correctly referencing and using EndNote after the session has ended

Analysis

Knowledge & comprehension

Application

Analysis

Evaluating the outcomes against Bloom

• Need to focus on progressing the synthesis and evaluation levels, but how?• Follow-up on students. There will be an opportunity

as I’m seeing the group again this semester. Are any still using EndNote?

• Devise a way of testing their knowledge for this second session – maybe another exercise embedded plus opportunities for questions

• Ask for feedback

Future actions

• Liked the breakout session – but try and elicit more participation/conversation

• Promote materials (eg slideshows, videos, handouts) arising from the session more effectively – via Moodle, social media, lecturer

• Reiterate – use Moodle forums, social media channels, rep forums to reinforce messages by repetition (Rothera, 2015)

• Focus on feedback!

Feedback

• Some formal feedback via surveys (OBU internal and external such as NSS)

• Informally through other channels (subject committees, from lecturers, views of Moodle tools)

• But do need to address, so may try Rothera’s open questions (p.41-42)

• Peer review of training sessions – ask a colleague to sit in

Recommendations

• Seek better channels for feedback

• Employ more drop-in sessions (Rothera, 2015)

• Create more online tools for use as-and-when – some progress made already with video for Communication Media & Culture undergrads

• Increase use of mixed methods in sessions

ReferencesBell, S. J. (2007) 'Stop IAKT syndrome with student live search demos', Reference Services Review, 35(1), pp. 98-108.

Butcher, C. (2014) 'Describing what students should learn', in Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. & Marshall, S. (eds.) A handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice. 4th ed. London: Routledge, pp. 80-93.

Carbery, A. and Hegarty, N. (2010) 'Think 'on' the box: delivering engaging library database training to first year undergraduate students', SCONUL Focus, (50), pp. 52-56.

Gross, M. and Latham, D. (2012) 'What's skill got to do with it?: Information literacy skills and self‐views of ability among first‐year college students', Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(3), pp. 574-583.

Keene, J., Colvin, J. and Sissons, J. (2010) 'Mapping student information literacy activity against Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills', Journal of Information Literacy, 4(1), pp. 5-17.

OCSLD and Oxford Brookes University (2015) Graduate attributes. Available at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/ocsld/your-development/teaching-and-learning/graduate-attributes/ (Accessed: 15th February 2016).

Rieh, S. Y., Collins-Thompson, K., Hansen, P. and Lee, H.-J. (2016) 'Towards searching as a learning process: A review of current perspectives and future directions', 42(1), pp. 19-34.

Rothera, H. (2015) 'Picking up the cool tools: working with strategic students to get bite-sized information literacy tutorials created, promoted, embedded, remembered and used', Journal of Information Literacy, 9(2), pp. 37-61.