Systems

Artifact: ED 690 Information Literacy Research

I can’t remember how I was partnered with my teammate in ED 690, but whether through intention or serendipity it turned out that we were both librarians. We were also both involved in information literacy teaching initiatives. The Association of College and Research Libraries defines information literacy as “a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information” (2000). I worked with graduate and post-graduate students, and her primary population was undergraduate, but we realized that information literacy was a complex and fascinating competency that we wanted to explore.

Information Literacy as a System

Our initial work revealed the systematic nature of information literacy. Susan Carol Curzon and Lynn Lampert, authors of Proven Strategies for Building an  Information Literacy Program, state that “each element of an information literacy program is essential to the whole” (p. xii). They even created an information literacy wheel as a visual representation of this pieces-of-a-whole concept. Throughout the course of the semester, we used our expanding knowledge of conducting primary research to examine the information literacy system. We decided to study the relationship between learner perceptions and actual skills.

We hypothesized that students who perceived their information literacy skills to be high would exhibit lower scores on actual competency assessments. We identified education and psychology literature to support that hypothesis, particularly that individuals with limited skills in a given area lack the cognitive ability to recognize their own incompetence. We created a mental model of the information literacy system based on our readings of this and related theories. We designed an instrument, collected data, did some analysis, and Voila! Imagine our surprise when the study results didn’t support our hypothesis! Our results indicated that students were capable of accurately assessing their information literacy skills both independently and relative to other students. This was the exact opposite of what we’d expected to see.

Sort of Like Jenga

So we looked again at the information literacy system and realized that any system requiring human input likely has almost limitless variation. In such a human-centered system, our hypothesis was like the Jenga game where pulling one block might make the whole tower collapse. Our results might have been affected by our instrument, the study population, whether students had been to the library recently, or the fact that 11% were recent recipients of undergraduate degrees. Instructor Marcie Bober-Michel asked, is your result generalizable? And we had to resoundingly answer “No.” Because along the way we’d discovered that not only is information literacy a system, it’s a system that operates differently in every setting.

I will admit to now looking critically at one-size-fits-all information literacy programs. I re-evaluated how I was teaching an adjunct information literacy course because I didn’t think the canned approach they encouraged was working. Of course a university can’t design information literacy instruction for each group of specific learners when there are over 1,200 students each semester who need to acquire those skills. But higher education is not a mechanistic system like an assembly line. It is an organic one, which lives and breathes almost like a human body. I am grateful to ED 690 for my admittedly very basic understanding of systems in education.

 

Association of College & Research Libraries. (2000). Information literacy competency standards for higher education. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Curzon, S. C., & Lampert, L. D. (2007). Proven strategies for building an information literacy program. New York, NY: Neal-Schuman.