2.3 Information Literacy

What is Information Literacy?

Human beings are passionate, curious, and always seeking to connect with each other and make sense of things. Learning is more effective when new information is meaningful and linked to some personal experience or prior knowledge. Learning is about both context and content. It is necessary to learn how to assess, evaluate, and connect in order to make information become knowledge. Information literacy skills are the hallmark of the ability to do research. What is important is for you to learn how to find information that “matters” and then figure out why it might matter.

Information literacy is a link between the life experiences of you as a student, the academic world of scholarship, and the post-college real world application of learning. An information-literate person has the ability to ask questions and knows the difference between ignorance and understanding. (When do I need information?) Information literacy builds a lifelong ability to determine where information is kept (Where is the best place to find this?) and in what forms knowledge is stored (Which knowledge products will likely have what I need?).

Information literacy relies on the use of a critical mind to discern credible from not credible, valid from not valid. It is actually the core of the first-year experience. It lasts, while the specifics of particular courses fade over time. After all, the nature of research, the core of higher education, is a learning process: “How do I learn about something?” Communication skills are essential to your ability to both learn and share what you’ve learned.

When conducting any type of thinking, you need to have a firm grasp on information literacy, or knowing how to access the sources you may need. Practicing good information literacy skills involves more than simply using a search engine such as Google, although that could be a starting point. You also engage in creative thinking (i.e., generating topics to research), analytical thinking (i.e., reading and examining the parts of sources), and critical thinking (i.e., evaluating sources for accuracy, authority, etc.). Then there is synthesis that is used when incorporating multiple sources into a research project. Information literacy utilizes all of the necessary thinking skills. If you saw the name of a person on the cover of a magazine, for instance, you might assume the person did something important to merit the attention. If you were to google the person’s name, you would instantly need to use context clues to determine if the information your search produced is actually about your person and not someone else with the same or a similar name, whether the information is accurate, and if it is current. If it is not, you would need to continue your research with other sources.

Verifying Valid Sources

The American Library Association defines information literacy as a set of skills that allow you to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” We need information almost all the time, and with practice, you’ll become more and more efficient at knowing where to look for answers on certain topics. As information is increasingly available in multiple formats, not only in print and online versions but also through audio and visual means, users of this information must employ critical thinking skills to sift through it all.

Starting your Research

Getting a good grade in college often relies on finding and using the best and most authoritative information on a topic. To do this, you have to think critically, work through the resources you find, and construct your own ideas. In this course we focus on developing research skills, which include finding information appropriate to your needs, evaluating that information, and using it ethically. These skills take time, effort, and reflection to acquire.

What is Research?

When you read the word research, you might think of the quick web searches we all do every day when we need basic information: a good recipe for Vietnamese bánh mì sandwiches, what are the top 100 movies of all time, what is Tourette syndrome, and so on. You might also think of writing a lengthy paper and the resources you’ll need to find and use within it.

Both of these processes are examples of seeking out information, but as you tackle more projects in college, your instructors will frequently use the word research to mean the process of finding and using authoritative resources. Thinking through the research process can help you be more efficient and effective, not only as it relates to coursework, but also when researching for your personal needs. Research is an ongoing cycle of questions and answers, which can quickly become very complex. Here are some important areas to think about when starting your research:

• Determining the scope of your research
• Developing your topic and research question
• Identifying key concepts for your topic

Popular and Scholarly Information

Peer-Review Process

Many instructors will expect you to use scholarly information. Therefore, it’s important to understand how scholarly works are reviewed and accepted. Experts in their field conduct research that they write up into an article and submit to journals for publication. When an editor receives a submission, the article is submitted to other experts in the field for peer review to determine if the work is good enough to be published in the journal. Only about 10% of articles that are submitted are published, which demonstrates that peer-reviewed articles you find in library databases are of high quality. Here is the typical publication process for a peer-reviewed article:

Peer-Review Process