Compartmentalization of Information Literacy Skills: Across Disciplines & Across Tasks

Typical information literacy instruction in Introductory Psychology courses at our institution is a single visit by the librarian to teach the institution’s search system, PsychInfo and PsychLit. This is inadequate. To help them achieve information literacy, we redesigned a class that explicitly and repeatedly taught the five standards of information literacy. Lectures, discussions, classroom activities, and homework assignments directly instructed the standards as part of the course content and requirements. Students’ learning of the standards were assessed in a final research project and PowerPoint presentation. We developed a rubric to assess the students’ comprehension and implementation of the information literacy standards. Standards were conceptualized behaviorally, with 4 achievement levels (from not achieved to excellent) for each standard. Each student’s PowerPoint was examined and assessed via the rubric by two independent reviewers. Very few discrepancies emerged from the assessment, and those were resolved by mutual agreement. Results revealed that about 50% of the students in the class seemed to have a firm grasp on the five standards of information literacy, whereas about 40% of the students showed extreme deficiencies in accessing, interpreting, using, communicating and citing information. This suggests a serious problem with the content delivery in this course, and, perhaps, that a more serious deficiency in understanding information literacy in Introductory Psychology courses is because the course curriculum does not make it a component of the course. I believe explanations may lie with the context of the assignment and with the course itself. I think that students in an English composition class would put more effort into citing their information as well as actually using the information that they cite. This may happen because in an English composition class, information literacy is emphasized. It seems students in a Psychology course think that citing their sources is not that important because what the professor is really after is their comprehension of the content. I also argue that students were less likely to use in-text citations and integrate information from the sources they cited in the references section because they were using a PowerPoint presentation instead of a formal paper to present their research. These arguments suggest that students may be compartmentalizing. They are not seeing all classes and all formats of assignments equally as far as information literacy is concerned. I argue there should be more research looking into the mental separation of disciplines in relation to the amount of effort put into attaining information literacy standards. I also argue more research is needed to identify ways to break this pattern of compartmentalizing and make information literacy a transferrable skill across all disciplines