How do you teach your students the right information skills?
Tools for information literacy skills
Students need to have excellent information skills to be able to write reliable papers or theses. Without these skills, students will not be able to find relevant and reliable sources, theses may be riddled with plagiarism and contain sloppy reference lists. Also after graduation, students will benefit from information literacy skills, because they will be dealing with information issues the rest of their professional lives.
But how do you teach your students the right information skills? From now on you will find a knowledge item and learning activities, developed by the university library, in the which you can put into practice in your teaching right away.
To incorporate information skills in your teaching, you must first have a clear view of what information skills are exactly and how you can teach them in the best possible way. In the knowledge item 鈥溾 in the Teaching and Learning Collection you will learn what things you must pay special attention to and what is important about teaching information skills in such a way that your students may benefit from it throughout their lives.
Learning activities
In your classes you can use one of the learning activities. With the help of 鈥溾 students use the knowledge they have acquired in the Compass module to set up guidelines themselves for evaluating sources. In this way students learn to reflect on the relevance and quality of sources. With the help of the learning activity 鈥溾 students help each other to find relevant sources for their research based on peer feedback. They will learn how to set up a search strategy and gain insight into the principles of the search process.
The knowledge item and the learning activities help you to use information skills in your teaching yourself, but you can always ask the library for assistance. Or invite an expert from the library to your classes to help students become familiar with information literacy skills.
Blended learning
Besides these items in the Teaching and Learning Collection, the university library offers online training courses and Libguides. They make blended learning possible. For instance, students could first master the basic skills at home and then get to work with these skills during classes.
Have a look at what the library can do for lecturers.