Information Literacy for General Studies

1. How do scholars, experts, or other professionals in your discipline generate new information, ideas, products, inventions, or creative works? Through research, testing and development, creative activities, etc.?
2. What processes (if any) are in place to ensure the quality, reliability, and/or originality of this output? Through peer-review, fact-checking, standards, copyright, patents, etc.?
3. How is this output communicated and shared with other scholars, experts, or professionals? Through journals, books, online forums, etc.? What is the purpose of sharing output with this audience?
4. How is this output communicated and shared with the general public? Through newspaper articles, magazine articles, blogs, websites, etc.? What is the purpose of sharing output with this audience?

• Get familiar with a journal article
• Exploring the chain of research
• Information creation in various sources
• Primary and secondary sources

Contact your subject librarian for more more assignment ideas and assistance with integrating information literacy skills into your General Studies course.

Guiding questions for understanding sources:

1. Can you identify different source types when you encounter them online?
2. How do different types of information sources solve different information problems? In other words, when and why would you seek information in a book versus a journal versus a newspaper article versus a website, etc.?

Guiding questions for finding sources:

1. How do you find and select appropriate databases to find sources?
2. How do you effectively search databases using keywords and synonyms? Why do keywords retrieve better results than searching using sentences?

Guiding questions for choosing sources:

1. When examining search results, how do you decide which are the most relevant to your information need?
2. When is it important to have high quality, credible results? Are there information needs for which quality and credibility are less important?
3. What techniques can you employ to determine if a source is credible? Do novice researchers use different techniques than expert researchers?

Guiding questions for citing sources:

1. Why do creators refer to outside sources? What does this achieve?
2. How do you incorporate sources into your work? How do you decide whether to quote, summarize, or paraphrase?
3. What are citations and how do you find the elements to construct them? What are the mechanics of citing within your text and how do you use a style guide?

• Article analysis (option 1)
• Article analysis (option 2)
• Annotated bibliography (option 1)
• Annotated bibliography (option 2)
• Finding and ranking sources
• The mechanics of identifying, finding, and evaluating sources

Contact your subject librarian for more more assignment ideas and assistance with integrating information literacy skills into your General Studies course.

1. What types of future information needs require thorough, comprehensive searching in order to gather and refer to lots of sources before making a decision, plan, best practice, or policy change? When and how do you know when you’ve searched comprehensively and/or found enough?
2. Provide students with a future scenario that requires finding high quality research information. For that situation, what types of information would you look for and why? What types of information would be inappropriate and/or less useful to use?
3. Provide students with a future scenario that requires finding information that’s not research and/or is lower stakes. For that situation, what types of information would you look for and why? What types of information would be less appropriate and/or less useful to use?
4. How do your information seeking strategies differ for questions 2 and 3 above? Why do some scenarios or decisions require thorough searching and/or finding high quality, credible sources, while others don’t?
5. When searching the web (Google) for information, what should you believe and under what circumstances should you be wary about the reliability of the information you’re viewing?

• Gathering different types and amounts of information
• Finding information for an employment scenario
• Assessing the utility and quality of sources
• Searching extensively for relevant sources

Contact your subject librarian for more more assignment ideas and assistance with integrating information literacy skills into your General Studies course.