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College & Research Libraries News

THE WAY I SEE IT: Remember when you were information illiterate? Make sure students know the basics

by Jennifer W. Kimball

About the author

Jennifer W Kimball is reference librarian at Eastern Mennonite University, e-mail: kimballj@emu.edu

THE WAY I SEE IT

We as librarians forget that we spend an entire graduate program learning how libraries work and how to scientifically extract what we want from them. And then we get frustrated when we see that our students go through cursory library instruction and still don’t grasp the concepts involved in finding material in the reference collection!

We’re frustrated because of the wealth that remains untapped by the students, precipitating exasperated remarks about not finding enough, or even not finding anything, on their topic.

And, of course, it’s frustrating to see them fail when we want them to learn and succeed. So it’s back to the drawing board as far as lesson plans go: Should I revise? Should this part of the lesson be allowed more time? Should the assignment be more complex or is this one of those academic conquests that can only be made by repeated practice over the course of a few years?

Since most of us who teach also have reference desk hours, we know the last statement to be true. The library is a four-year course (at the very least). Our teaching occurs not only in classes, but also intermittently throughout a student’s academic career via the reference desk. Information literacy does not happen in oneshot bibliographic instruction. It happens over time, with diverse problems to be solved, with the accumulation of knowledge, and with repeated practice.

Begin where they are

In my third year as an academic reference librarian, I still err on the side of assuming too high a level of information comprehension, especially of first-year students. This semester I spent an additional class period with the firstyear college writing classes, introducing them to Web site evaluation. A handful of carefully chosen URLs were examined by small groups within the class, and each group reported its conclusions regarding the validity of the sites for academic research. I had anticipated them having some difficulty in answering questions about currency, coverage, authority, and so on. I had not anticipated what surfaced as the first hurdle.

Several groups had trouble figuring out what the page was actually about. They could not understand the information presented. When they immediately skipped to the list of questions I asked them to examine in reference to the site, it was, of course, impossible for them to reach accurate conclusions, not having a grasp of the first crucial piece of knowledge: an understanding of the basic message of the Web page.

The library is a four-year course (at the very least).

The sites I picked were hardly obtuse; the vocabulary was not too difficult, the layout was uncluttered, the information was presented in a logical flow. Yet, too many students could not “read” it. The assignment would have been a complete failure if I had not worked with each struggling group to make sure the students comprehended the basic message presented in the text.

What were they missing?

In the well-known “Feline Reactions to Bearded Men,”’ a group did not pick up on the humor of the findings, or the tongue-in-cheek tone, much less the suspicious items in the bibliography. In a site reporting a movement to curb smoking in restaurants”, some groups could not tell if the movement was for or against smoking; they had difficulty determining the separate entities of the reporter and the anti-smoking group; and finding out that the site author was pro-smoking confused them even further.

There are plenty of mistakes to be made in teaching. Forgetting what it is like to be a young college student should be one that we conquer. Remember when your professors, experts in a field, asked you to critique an article or book? Just barely introduced to the major themes of a topic, brand new to the names of favorite scholars quoted throughout the literature, and struggling to comprehend the message itself, we somehow were expected to summon the confidence to yea or naysay someone’s hard work (presented apparently eruditely, and even in proper publication format). Remember thinking, “Well, it got published, it must be worthy”?

Our students today, looking at Web pages, are no different. In the first year of college, students are at the beginning of a long road to information literacy. We can’t skip to the advanced skills before they’ve grasped the basic content. To teach successfully, we begin where they are. Only then will the lesson have a chance.

Notes

1. http://www.improb.com/airchives/ cat.html
2. http://www.speakup.org/plan.html ■