Help students develop strategies to find quality articles.

Learning activity to guide students in Political Science 101 through locating scholarly sources for an annotated bibliography.

The goal of this in-class activity is to help students relate database searching to something they already have familiarity with. This is interdisciplinary and could be adapted for any subject or database. Students will explore a timely topic on Twitter using a hashtag and note bias, tone, authority, and related hashtags before conducting a similar search on a library database or discovery tool. Students and instructors then discuss similarities and differences between both searches and their results. 

A graphic guide on country research focused on strategies in searching Business Source Complete to find various kinds of country reports in the database and also some other public resources.Three pages allow you to print at bookmark size with the landscape layout.

An open access MOOC in French to bonify the information literacy skills of university students (with Moodle).

This lesson is designed to orient teacher education students to the library spaces and resources that support the development of multiple literacies by using a gamified tour through a series of stations throughout the library. Exploration stations are focused on themes of Indigenous perspectives and critical literacy, differentiated reading materials, leisure reading, coding and computational thinking resources, and “making” stories through unplugged STEAM activities. At each station, students engage with the resources through conversation, play, and decision-making. Students will gain an appreciation for the breadth of library resources to support the development of multiple literacies, and begin to critically appraise teaching and learning resources for the classroom. The Unlock Library Literacy workshop models a gamified approach to learning design. Students gather in small groups and engage in a self-guided exploration of stations throughout the library, with librarians available to facilitate and answer questions. An online survey platform is used to randomly move students from one station to the next, and states the tasks students must perform at each location. After completing each exploration station, students will receive a clue. After completing all required stations, students will have the code for a combination lock that they can use to unlock a box and get a prize.  

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)

This is a recorded webcast presentation featuring tips on using the MLA International Bibliography to teach scholarly research concepts and analytical skills.