Deciding who to vote for can be hard. On top of that, finding information about local elections can sometimes be difficult, as can be figuring out if you agree with a candidate on an issue that you don’t know too much about. This activity engages students in the civic process and in research. Students will use internet searching to find information about candidates, and database searching to find information out about an issue. 

A list of criteria to help students check if they followed all steps to create an optimized search strategy. We used it for searches in engineering database, but it can be used in all fields. For certain fields, it might need small modifications. Aussi disponible en français dans la "Sandbox".

Grille de vérification que les étudiants peuvent remplir après avoir développé une stratégie pour s'assurer d'avoir réfléchi à toutes les facettes de leur stratégie. En français (English version also available in the Sandbox)

In this activity, students work in groups to craft a response to a presidential tweet from an assigned perspective (e.g. right or left leaning news source). In doing so, they are required to find, evaluate, and effectively use information to make a case. Unlike a research paper, which aspires to be neutral or unbiased, this activity asks students to respond to a tweet from a particular perspective, with a particular bias, requiring them to engage with their sources in a new way. The activity is followed by a discussion of students' interactions with the information they found and presented. 

This is a lesson plan that centers around a 30-minute activity that gets students thinking and talking about the primary sources they create as they go about their daily lives, in order to prepare them to understand and contextualize the primary sources they encounter in historical research. They will also learn skills that can be transferred to future archival research. This works well as part I of a two-part interaction with classes. Typically, I go to their classroom for this lesson, meeting the students in a room in which they feel comfortable. They then come to the library several weeks later for a research-intensive workshop.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.Start with StudentScholarLessonPlan.pdf below.

This is designed as a 75 minute lesson plan. It isn’t tied to specific course content, but can be tailored to a particular course and scaled to shorter or longer class sessions. It is designed as more of a theoretical, reflective introduction to concepts of privacy and security than as a nuts-and-bolts or tech heavy workshop, and it includes a debate activity entitled "The Rewards and Risks of Convenience." It could also be used as part 1 in a two-part workshop series in which the second focuses more on specific strategies/methods/software.

The credit-bearing classroom provides librarians with expanded opportunities to connect with students as teachers, mentors, and advocates. Both the content and approach of one-shot sessions are often driven by faculty requests for resource-based instruction. Librarians teaching credit-bearing classes do not face the same constraints on their time with students or limitations on instructional content. Accordingly, librarians in credit-bearing settings can go beyond demonstrating databases or teaching discrete skills to engage students in learning research concepts and to advocate for information- related social justice issues. One such advocacy issue is copyleft, a movement responding to the constraints of traditional copyright by allowing the licensed work to be used, modified, and distributed as determined by the work’s creator. By introducing students to the copyleft movement, librarians can encourage students to make their works more freely available and to engage in the conversation of scholarship. This chapter presents a case study of a research methods course in which students created and embedded Creative Commons licenses in digital platforms in order to encourage learners to critically evaluate the production and value of information.

A classroom activity and lesson plan for first-year students. Your students will learn to differentiate between different categories of items -- such as Popular/Scholarly, or Primary/Secondary/Tertiary -- by playing this fun and easy game.

Initially developed in early 2018, this three-session workshop series created by instruction librarians is facilitated through the Office of Faculty Excellence at East Carolina University. Participants include classroom faculty and instructors from a wide range of disciplines and fields. Session 1 focuses on information literacy as a broad concept, asks attendees to brainstorm and develop a shared definition of information literacy, and provides a general overview of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. Session 2 includes deeper discussion of the Framework and disciplinary culture, with participants reflecting on their own experiences moving from novice to expert in their fields inspired by Miller's Thinking Through Information Literacy In Your Discipline Worksheet. Session 3 is an applied working session in which attendees work through a backward design-based worksheet to design a learning scenario informed by a specific Frame or Frames.