We all suffer from information overload. There’s just too much “stuff” out there, and it’s not easy to keep up. At the same time, there’s an irony—yes, we are surrounded by information, but we can never seem to find what we want when we want it, and in the form we want so that we can use it effectively. 

One solution to the information problem—the one that seems to be most often adopted in schools (as well as in business and society in general)—is to speed things up. Speeding things up can only work for so long. Instead, we need to think about helping students to work smarter, not faster. There is an alternative to speeding things up. It’s the smarter solution—one that helps students develop the skills and understandings they need to find, process, and use information effectively. This smarter solution focuses on the process as well as the content. Some people call this smarter solution information literacy or information skills instruction. We call it the Big6.

The Big6 is a process model of how people of all ages solve an information problem. From practice and study, we found that successful information problem-solving encompasses six stages from Task Definition to Evaluation.