Thriving in Academe

Adopting and Integrating Information Literacy

• The idea of making process a key element in assignments caused English teacher E.M. to change her practice. Now instead of a single 15-page final paper, she assigns five 3-page papers throughout the semester. Specific, key skills she wishes to help students develop, such as hypothesis development, citation use, and clear expression are practiced, selectively, in each paper. E.M.'s feedback for each paper helps students improve in the next one. The amount of reading this teacher does is still the same, yet the quality of student work and the teacher's satisfaction are much greater.
• J.K. has integrated a process-reporting component into every research assignment. When students turn in their final reports or papers, they also submit a completed form that describes and traces their search strategy—what sources they looked at, how and why they chose the sources, and what other possible sources may be available.
• The students in L.B.'s class use the Problem-Based Learning approach in their international relations course. One of the first steps in the process is student identification of what needs to be learned in order to be able to work on a problem and possibly address it. Part of this step is the development of a flow chart to describe potential channels for information gathering.

next "Thriving" article