This lesson plan introduces students to lateral reading techniques using the SIFT method. Designed and implemented for a political science introduction to international relations course, this can easily be adapted to other media literacy contexts. Students will practice lateral reading with sample news articles. Worksheets, slides, and sample articles are linked in the lesson plan. Alternative news articles can be substituted.

This infographic guide on the literature review process help researchers decide where to search, how to search, how to organize the search process and increase the productivity, and how evaluate scholarly articles. Altough the Guide is created to meet the needs of public administration research, the approaches can be used by other disicplines as well.

This document provides directions and information needed to complete a curriculum map for the Political Science Department at the University of North Texas. Other subject librarians may use this document to guide their own curriculum mapping projects.

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

This is a handout I shared with students in a senior seminar class. I introduced students to the concept "Research as Inquiry" and showed them different things they could do that are part of this frame. The handout helped me introduce topics I had not included in instruction work before. Many students in the class visited me during a research consultation and I felt like they were better prepared for that meeting .

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

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. 

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. 

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.

A discussion and overview of the following ideasWhy we see things differently.Why we don’t like to be wrong.Why it is dangerous to question authority.Where we got the letter A.The morbidity of Puritan children’s books.How culture and community impact information.The origin of the political parties in America.How information is dangerous and can be used to disrupt or preserve a social order. take note of the following terms:cognitive dissonanceconfirmation biasdisconfirmation biasoppositional media hostilitypropagandatop-down information systemsbottom-up information systemspublic spheresocial responsibility theory of journalismobjectivitythe Fairness DoctrineNet Neutrality