Embedded Information Literacy Instruction Based on the General-Purpose Writing Course for Undergraduate Freshmen: A Case Study of the Library of Southern University of Science and Technology

Abstract

[Purpose/Significance] The collaboration between the instructor of a general-purpose course "Writing and Communication" and information literacy (IL) librarian teachers at Southern University of Science and Technology provides a new embedded teaching cooperation scheme for an undergraduate writing course. This new model can help college academic librarians design more active ways to teach embedded IL class in general-purpose writing courses for freshmen and sophomores against the background of cultivating "top innovative professionals". [Method/Process] Based on the teaching collaboration between the librarians and the instructors in the past five years, we explored and analyzed effective and integrated teaching models of embedded IL education. Focusing on assessment and student's learning outcome, we constructed an embedded IL teaching evaluation model to comprehensively evaluate student's learning outcome, which includes both direct and indirect evaluation. The direct assessment includes five evaluation indicators: information awareness, information inquiry and access, information evaluation, information management and utilization, and information regulation and security. The indirect evaluation is a "librarian-writing instructor" dual assessment based on students' course papers, in which the librarian and the writing instructor rate students' IL skills and writing skills independently and then compare the assessment results. The librarian scrutinizes students' work under the rubric of search strategy, resource selection and reference standardization; and the writing instructor examines the critical thinking, essay structure and writing style of students' papers. The comparison of the scores on writing and information use of students' papers provide quantitative evaluation on the correlation of students' writing and information skills. [Results/Conclusions] There is a positive correlation between IL and writing performance. College freshmen differ from senior students in IL competence in many ways due to their lack of information training and of limited exposure to various academic scenarios. Thus, besides teaching basic searching skills, instructors should also help students build up information awareness and competence by situating IL teaching in specific writing tasks in an integrated teaching model. By collaborating with writing instructors, the embedded information session is more contextualized, and therefore a "process-based" IL development can be demonstrated to students. Other new pedagogical approaches such as flipped classroom also help to enhance teaching and learning.

Keywords

• embedded classes|undergraduate freshmen|writing for the general-purpose education|integrated education|information literacy assessment