The Information Literacy Education Project at WSU Libraries

WSU and other institutes of higher education are increasingly incorporating Information Literacy (IL) into their educational goals. Academic departments are actively seeking ways to incorporate IL into their curriculum in addition to seeking methods to assess the instruction provided. Librarians as IL instructors are in a unique position to collaborate with teaching faculty to address the educational needs of their students. The Information Literacy Education (ILE) project developed by the WSU Libraries and funded by a WSU Teaching and Learning Grant is mapped to the six learning goals of the baccalaureate, university strategic plan, and a 2000 Washington State legislature mandate, and provides opportunities for teaching faculty and librarians to collaborate on incorporating IL into existing research assignments with librarians. Teaching faculty and librarians design an additional IL component of the research assignment in the form of an online course space. As students work through the course space they are provided instruction via online tutorials on those elements related to IL that are required to complete the assignment. Having the ability to utilize more than WSU online offerings, the ILE project makes use of the best online tutorials available, while also providing multiple layers of assessment. Their learning is tested via multiple choice quizzes, and their ability to transfer the learned material to the contextualized application of their research assignment is assessed via short essays. Within the course space, instructors are provided multiple opportunities to provide feedback at various stages of the assignment. Teaching faculty have found that the resources their students utilize are more relevant, current, and the tendency of students to simply select the first 5 sources found is reduced through participation in the project.Washington State Universit