What Do You Want Me to Do with This?: Teaching Students How to Work with Information Sources
Type of Presentation
Panel (1 hour and 15 minutes presentation total for two or more presenters)
Target Audience
Higher Education
Location
Room 212
Abstract
For today’s college students, finding information is often the easiest part of the research and writing process. What is far more challenging is developing the requisite skills needed to use information sources effectively. Helping students learn how to work purposefully and thoughtfully with sources cannot be achieved in a one-shot instruction session. At our university, librarians and composition instructors have collaborated to develop instructional scaffolding that helps students to actively engage with information sources and the contexts in which these are created, evaluated, and used. The presenters (a librarian and composition instructor) will share classroom activities they developed to address shared learning outcomes in their information literacy and writing curricula. In a variation on the traditional annotated bibliography assignment, the presenters developed exercises designed to help students conceptualize information need in terms of the rhetorical purposes that drive how writers deploy sources in research-based writing. A subsequent assignment asks students to use Prezi (a presentation software) to visually represent the dynamics of the scholarly conversations they have unearthed in their research. As they explore and chart how scholars critically engage with the claims and arguments of other scholars in order to test, formulate, and refine their own positions, students gain insight into the value of sources as well as the processes by which new knowledge is created. In this way, the foundation is laid for the students’ own entry into scholarly conversation.
Presentation Description
For today’s college students, finding information is often the easiest part of the research and writing process. What is far more challenging is developing the requisite skills needed to use information sources effectively. The presenters (a librarian and composition instructor) share classroom activities they developed to address this learning outcome.
Keywords
Source evaluation, Rhetoric, Scholarly conversation, Scaffolding assignments, Critical thinking, Teaching partnerships, 21st Century Literacy, Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Rumble, Juliet T. and Doukopoulos, Lindsay M., "What Do You Want Me to Do with This?: Teaching Students How to Work with Information Sources" (2016). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 82.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2016/2016/82
What Do You Want Me to Do with This?: Teaching Students How to Work with Information Sources
Room 212
For today’s college students, finding information is often the easiest part of the research and writing process. What is far more challenging is developing the requisite skills needed to use information sources effectively. Helping students learn how to work purposefully and thoughtfully with sources cannot be achieved in a one-shot instruction session. At our university, librarians and composition instructors have collaborated to develop instructional scaffolding that helps students to actively engage with information sources and the contexts in which these are created, evaluated, and used. The presenters (a librarian and composition instructor) will share classroom activities they developed to address shared learning outcomes in their information literacy and writing curricula. In a variation on the traditional annotated bibliography assignment, the presenters developed exercises designed to help students conceptualize information need in terms of the rhetorical purposes that drive how writers deploy sources in research-based writing. A subsequent assignment asks students to use Prezi (a presentation software) to visually represent the dynamics of the scholarly conversations they have unearthed in their research. As they explore and chart how scholars critically engage with the claims and arguments of other scholars in order to test, formulate, and refine their own positions, students gain insight into the value of sources as well as the processes by which new knowledge is created. In this way, the foundation is laid for the students’ own entry into scholarly conversation.
