Foundational College Information Literacy Skills for High School Students

This panel will discuss the development of a partnership between an academic library at a mid-sized research university and a rural high school English Composition program. Panelists from both units will discuss the genesis of their partnership, impact on student success, plans for the future, and the benefits and challenges of building such a program. This partnership is designed to prepare college-bound high school juniors and seniors to succeed in first- and second-year research projects. We were inspired by the ACRL’s Framework to create affective learning objectives--Dispositions--to express our goals for the attitudes we hoped these students would adopt by the end of the semester. We had two of these, one for the juniors and one for the seniors. For the juniors: Students will view the library as a friendly place where they belong. For the seniors: Students will feel comfortable coming to a librarian when they wish for assistance. We collaboratively designed learning materials for each composition writing assignment. Librarians visited the high school and taught four lessons throughout the semester followed by the individual students visiting the library for a tailored research consultation with an academic librarian. Short formative assessments were collected at the end of each session to gauge student comprehension. Students’ final research papers were subjected to content analysis for the presence of a refined research question and relevant scholarly articles. We use a combination of our assessment evaluations, student feedback, and anecdotal evidence to make programmatic improvements for each iteration