Teaching

When I am teaching information literacy skills to students there are several techniques I like to address. One of the first things I like to discuss in a lecture is practicing critical reading strategies. I encourage students to take notes, annotate, and summarize their readings. If students can practice paraphrasing course content and readings then they are on the right path to truly synthesizing what they’ve just read. I like to also discuss three major ways students can practice reading skills, if students work towards identifying language, arguments, reasoning, and opposing argument patterns they can fully formulate a functioning thesis statement.

In regards to assessing scholarly research I like to examine several aspects and impart this on students in order to harbor deeper information literacy. While using websites and articles not affiliated with an academic database, there are techniques they should use in order to determine if a source is legitimate. Here are a few things students need to examine when using sources found on online through web browsers:

• Who published the information (authorship)
• When and where was it published (currency/relevance)
• How accurate is the information? Are the facts true or false (accuracy)
• How is the information presented? (biases)
• What references do they cite? (hyperlinks/articles/primary or secondary sources)

These techniques allow researchers to assess what type of information they are reading and they can evaluate if they want to include these sources in their scholarly work. These are also the basic foundations and principles of information literacy.