Information Literacy Tools for Faculty

I attended the CLA convention at the San Jose Convention Center in mid-November. The session entitled “Information Literacy Learning Strategies Faculty Love!” offered some suggestions to provide faculty with tools to increase information literacy through class assignments and incorporated into the class syllabus. Two librarians presented clear information on how to collaborate with teachers in an academic environment. One librarian, Barbara Quaron from CSU San Bernardino discovered professors want students who:
· are engaged in reading
· use a variety of information resources
· are well-rounded
She created information literacy assignments that address these areas and are flexible, use a variety of sources and critical thinking, and are easy to grade and update.

Barbara developed four assignments for freshmen and suggested using them individually or in sequence. Quickwrite covers reading: connecting an assigned reading to secondary sources and writing about the experience. WebWork is a tutorial that covers search engines and web evaluation through search strategies and domain searching. Step-by-Step is guided instruction to cover online tools, such as library databases. Meet the Author is an exercise for the student to think about criteria for the authority of a source. The professors found these tools beneficial for the students to connect reading and writing and think critically. A bonus to using these tools is that the professors are happy to keep them in their syllabus term after term. Samples of these assignments can be found at http://www.lib.csusb.edu/Barbara/infolit.cfm