A Brave New World: Threshold Concepts and First Year Student Information Literacy

For many years, Flinders University Library has provided a library quiz, primarily aimed at first year students. Starting life as a paper-based assignment, the quiz was moved into the University’s learning management system in the 2000s. The library quiz focused purely on practical information literacy skills: how to search the catalogue, how to search databases etc. As time went on, it became clear that the quiz was not working. The videos and screenshots quickly became obsolete with frequent database interface changes. We were constantly updating the quiz at our busiest time of the year. It just was not sustainable. More importantly, students who took the quiz would continue to struggle with basic library skills. In late 2015, extensive research into threshold concepts for information literacy indicated that our students were struggling with practical information literacy skills, the how, because they hadn’t been taught the why: why they should be using academic literature in their assignments. Why they shouldn’t be using websites and blogs in their reference lists. It was decided to completely change the focus of the quiz to teach threshold concepts based on the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. We interviewed forty academics and students from Flinders and asked them about their information seeking practices. These interviews were distilled into eleven short videos. The assessment part of the quiz was also changed to be self-reflective rather than formal right-wrong questions. In January 2018, the new quiz, rebranded as Library World, went live. In the past twelve months, we have had over three thousand students complete Library World. The reflective assessment has given the library a rich source of data. This paper will discuss what information literacy trends can be discerned from the data and whether the switch to teaching threshold concepts has had a meaningful impact on students’ information literacy fluency