You are probably teaching information literacy without even knowing it. The American Library Association defines information literacy:
"To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information...Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them. They are people prepared for lifelong learning, because they can always find the information needed for any task or decision at hand."
The Association of College and Research Libraries has developed a framework to help get a better understanding of how information literacy fits in higher education. Take a look and see how this framework might fit into your instruction.
Information Literacy (IL) refers to the ability to recognize a need for information and to find, analyze, and synthesize related material from books, articles, websites and more.
How Can IL Benefit Students?
A 2017 survey of 42,000 students in more than 1,700 courses at 12 major research universities showed that:
How Can IL Benefit Faculty?
Students who are information literate are better able to come up with workable topics for their papers, research those topics independently, and write papers that conform to rigorous academic standards.
If you are using any of these tutorials in a class, please link to the guide and not the individual tutorial to ensure that you will always have the most updated content and avoid outdated links. If you use any of these online library instruction tutorials for a class, please fill out this brief form to track usage and inform content creation.
Videos, tutorials and handouts to help you find, evaluate and use information resources.
