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As part of the Information Literacy Initiative at the University of North Texas, a team of librarians conducted a curriculum mapping project to improve UNT students’ critical thinking and ability to use information effectively. Their project aimed to help enhance core library services with high-impact practices. They mapped student learning outcomes to know which core courses addressed components of the AAC&U Information Literacy VALUE Rubric and ACRL Framework as well as identify gaps in library instruction. Their intent is that other librarians would address these gaps through strategically targeted library instruction. The handout and poster provided are infographics that they use to communicate the curriculum mapping results to their faculty. Created in Piktochart, the graphics may be used as design inspiration for others to communicate the results of their curriculum mapping projects. In 2021, these files were re-examined for errors and replaced with new verison. Previous downloads numbers: handout 429 times and poster 343 times
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Brea Henson
Resource Type(s): Other
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Searching as Strategic Exploration, Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Wendy Traas
Resource Type(s): Activity, Lesson Plan
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Has Value, Research as Inquiry, Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Faith Rusk
Resource Type(s): Activity, Worksheet
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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".
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Christine Brodeur
Resource Type(s): Instruction Program Material, Worksheet
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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)
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Christine Brodeur
Resource Type(s): Instruction Program Material, Worksheet
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as Process
Contributor: Faith Rusk
Resource Type(s): Activity, Assignment Prompt
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This is a recorded webcast presentation featuring tips on using the MLA International Bibliography to teach scholarly research concepts and analytical skills.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Scholarship as Conversation, Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Angela Ecklund
Resource Type(s): Conference Presentation
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The MLA provides short tutorial videos that help users make the most of the bibliography’s rich metadata and its advanced searching and filtering features. New and updated tutorials are released throughout the year.If you have a suggestion for a topic that you would like to see covered in a tutorial, please let us know by sending an e-mail to bibliography@mla.org.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Angela Ecklund
Resource Type(s): Tutorial
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The MLA has developed an online course to teach students how to use the MLA International Bibliography for college-level research. Each of the five units in the course presents a lesson, followed by progression questions to reinforce the lesson through active engagement with the bibliography, and a quiz. Students will receive a badge upon passing each quiz and a course-completion badge after completing all the lessons and passing all five quizzes.The course usually takes students ninety minutes or less to complete and requires that they have access to the MLA International Bibliography on the EBSCO platform through their institution’s library. Students can create a free account to take the course and start earning badges.In January 2018, the MLA launched four new subject area modules to accompany its online course Understanding the MLA International Bibliography. Each module focuses on searching the bibliography for scholarly publications in one of four disciplines: folklore, linguistics, film (including television, video, and other broadcast media), and rhetoric and composition. Students who complete the new modules can earn badges in each of these four subject areas. Visit the course site to access the main course and new modules.Interested in other resources for teaching research and information literacy? Visit the Teaching Resources page on The MLA Style Center, where you’ll find lesson plans, assignments, and an instructor’s guide to integrating the online course into class curricula.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Angela Ecklund
Resource Type(s): Learning Object
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This undergraduate course, offered online, combines the concepts of scholarship and information literacy in a set of five modules with instructions, guided tasks and assignments. The course lies within an adult education Bachelor of Arts in Leadership (Trinity Western University).
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Framework as a Whole
Contributor: William Badke
Resource Type(s): Other
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This lesson plan uses Kevin Seeber's process cards and our newly created set of process cards that focus on news sources. In the activities using the process cards, our students were able to define and contextualize different types of information resources, including news sources. The tranfer and apply assessment used to close the session provides an opportunity for the students to think about how they would integrate these types of information into coursework, the workplace, and their personal lives.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as Process
Contributor: Susan Miller
Resource Type(s): Activity, Assessment Material, Lesson Plan
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If there were a list of things I absolutely required all my students to understand before leaving my class, the relationship between mass media, politics, and science would be close to the top of the list. But there are a lot of moving parts in these relationships, so the terrain is difficult to traverse. As one might expect of a difficult topic, there is much to read and a lot to unpack. This pathfinder discusses how politics and our mass media system complicate the dissemination of important scientific information.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as Process, Information Has Value, Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation, Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Todd Heldt
Resource Type(s): Blog Post, Learning Object, Research Guide
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The Critical Information Literacy Lesson Plan includes a lesson plan with a bibliography of assigned readings and discussion questions for students as well as presentation slides with main points from the lesson: definition of critical information literacy, evaluating information is a process, authority is constructed and contextual, how to evaluate information, and check the facts.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual
Contributor: Latia Ward
Resource Type(s): Assignment Prompt, Bibliography, Lesson Plan, Slide Deck
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Creation as Process
Contributor: Claire Lobdell
Resource Type(s): Activity, Lesson Plan
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Scholarship as Conversation, Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Anaya Jones
Resource Type(s): Activity, Lesson Plan
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Has Value
Contributor: Claire Lobdell
Resource Type(s): Lesson Plan
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Studying music in an online setting requires that students and instructors leverage digital resources and participatory technologies with understanding and intentionality. Meta-literacy, a framework promoting critical thinking and collaboration, is an inclusive approach to understanding the complexities of information use, production, and sharing in a digital environment. This chapter explores the implications of meta-literacy for the online music classroom and identifies ways in which the librarian and music instructor can collaborate to promote student self-reflection on the use, creation, and understanding of musical information or content.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as Process, Information Has Value, Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation, Searching as Strategic Exploration, Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Rachel Scott
Resource Type(s): Activity, Assignment Prompt, Lesson Plan, Practitioner Reflection, Publication, Other
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In this exploratory study the author asks students enrolled in a credit-bearing undergraduate research methods course to rank and evaluate the troublesome, transformative, and integrative nature of the six frames currently comprising the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. The results indicate that students have valid insights into threshold concept-based instruction, but may confuse the application with the theory. If practitioners are to embrace not only the frames, but also the spirit of the Framework, we must directly involve students in our teaching and research practices.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as Process, Information Has Value, Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation, Searching as Strategic Exploration, Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Rachel Scott
Resource Type(s): Practitioner Reflection, Publication
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Librarians are frequently asked to “teach” several databases in a 1-shot session, despite findings suggesting that such database demonstrations do not lead to optimal student outcomes. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education highlights the concepts of metaliteracy and metacognition. This paper investigates ways in which I leveraged both of these concepts to reconcile my pedagogical ideals with an attempt to honor a faculty member’s request. By demonstrating question posing and making my own metacognitive processes transparent to students, I found that I could honor a faculty request for specific database demonstration while helping learners comprehend and see beyond the constructs of platform and format.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Rachel Scott
Resource Type(s): Activity, Assignment Prompt, Practitioner Reflection, Publication, Worksheet, Other
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Although much of the classical music repertory is centuries old, musicians and musicologists participate in ongoing and lively conversations about the works. New insights on old works increasingly surface thanks to technological innovations: from data-rich digital humanities projects to casual online forums where media and text can be posted and discussed. The study and performance of a musical work--even more so than text-based disciplines--should be informed by a variety of sources in a wide array of formats. As the interplay between audience and performer becomes increasingly dynamic and the potential sources for study multiply, librarians can help students negotiate this sustained, multi-format discourse. Unlike other disciplines in which there may be an uncontested answer, a musical work is subject to interpretation in unique ways. “Scholarship as Conversation” provides a framework with which musicians might begin to navigate the many considerations of how to perform or understand a piece. In order to fully appreciate the lifecycle of the work, for example, once must synthesize a variety of contemporary and historical recordings, scholarly, manuscript, and performing scores, composer biography, and other contextual information. Academic librarians must partner with music faculty to offer instruction that specifically targets and assesses student understanding of the dialogic nature of music performance and study. By helping musicians understand the many voices engaged in this dialogue, such collaborations could make a meaningful impact on the musician’s stock-in-trade: her performance.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Creation as Process, Scholarship as Conversation, Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Rachel Scott
Resource Type(s): Activity, Assignment Prompt, Practitioner Reflection, Publication
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Has Value
Contributor: Rachel Scott
Resource Type(s): Assignment Prompt, Practitioner Reflection, Publication
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Creation as Process, Searching as Strategic Exploration
Contributor: Peter Catlin
Resource Type(s): Activity, Lesson Plan
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This rubric was developed to assess students' written reflections about primary source materials they encountered in class. Developed by Meggan Press and Meg Meiman at Indiana University Libraries in Bloomington, this rubric is designed for instructors to gauge students' primary source literacy skills for short- or long-form written projects. It was adapted from the SAA/RBMS Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation
Contributor: Meg Meiman
Resource Type(s): Assessment Material, Rubric
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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.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Framework as a Whole
Contributor: Meghan Wanucha
Resource Type(s): Practitioner Reflection, Professional Development Material, Research Guide, Slide Deck, Worksheet
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This workshop delivers an action-oriented introduction to personal data privacy designed for new college students. The session is designed to reveal the systems in place to collect and analyze online behavioral data, and to unveil the real-world consequences of online profiling in contexts like sentiment shaping, consumer preferences, employment, healthcare, personal finance, and law enforcement. In lieu of a prescriptive approach, students analyze case studies to observe how online behaviors impact real-world opportunities and reflect on the benefits and risks of technology use to develop purposeful online behaviors and habits that align with their individual values. Developing knowledge practices regarding privacy and the commodification of personal information and embodying the core library values of privacy and intellectual freedom, the workshop promotes a proactive rather than reactive approach and presents a spectrum of privacy preferences across a range of contexts in order to respect students’ autonomy and agency in personal technology use.
Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed: Information Has Value
Contributor: Alexandria Chisholm
Resource Type(s): Activity, Instruction Program Material, Learning Object, Lesson Plan, Research Guide, Slide Deck, Worksheet