Library News for the Faculty

Information Literacy Instruction in Action

Do Your Students' Technology Abilities Make the Grade?

Today's students have been using computers almost from their first days in kindergarten, if not before. But when it comes to using technology for information- and research-related assignments, does their work measure up?

The UCLA Library's Information Literacy Program is exploring this issue as part of its overall goal to enhance students' abilities to effectively and efficiently find and use information. These abilities are essential to achieve the standard of excellence that UCLA expects of its undergraduate and graduate students.

Known as information and communications technology (ICT) literacy, this concept encompasses the specific skills required to:

• Define an information need
• Access resources and information
• Manage information
• Integrate information through interpretation and synthesis
• Evaluate resources and information
• Create new information by authorship or adaptation
• Communicate information to particular audiences

Each skill has cognitive, ethical, and technical components; the Library's efforts focus on enhancing the cognitive and ethical aspects of students' abilities within a broader framework of technical proficiency that most already possess.

Two UCLA librarians -- Eleanor Mitchell, head of the College Library, and Stephanie Sterling Brasley, information literacy coordinator and librarian in the College Library -- are currently participating in a national project to develop an assessment tool that measures ICT literacy. The Educational Testing Service and seven colleges and universities including UCLA, the California State University system, University of Washington, and Purdue University are partnering in this effort. As recently announced in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the first full-scale administration of the instrument will be in early 2005.

An example of a task that assesses a student's ability to access resources and information uses the following scenario: A hypothetical student has conducted a search for a class group project using an Internet search engine but did not receive relevant results; he then sent an instant message to fellow group members asking for suggestions.

The student being tested must examine the responses from the group members, rank them according to which is most and which is least likely to produce relevant results, and identify the main problem with the original search.

An example of a task for measuring a student's ability to create new information involves the creation of a graph. The student is presented with an outline of a project and a set of data needed for the project; he or she must determine the graph's independent and dependent variables, assess different versions of the graph to choose the one that best represents the data needed for the project, then answer a research question using the information contained in the graph.

Improved ICT literacy skills can enable your students to perform better on your class assignments. In the longer term, they can also free up valuable class time formerly spent on instructing students about technology-related tasks such as how to frame a clear, concise research statement, how to conduct and refine a search, how to extract information from a database, how to construct a graph, and how to create a report.

The Library's Information Literacy Program will work with you to create a collaborative approach tailored to your subject matter and instructional methods. Contact Patti Caravello, director of the program, by phone at extension 55025 or by email.