ED 2210 - Literacy in the Content Area Classroom (LaSalle)

Some of you might have a school librarian who can work with your students on their research. But many of you will have to take your students' information literacy needs into your own hands. 

Information literacy is more than just being able to find an article to write your paper. It is about being able to understand your "information need," evaluate information, and synthesize.

Last week, a new study from Stanford University revealed that many students are inept at discerning fact from opinion when reading articles online.

Last year, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) developed the Framework for Information Literacy. 

This new Framework is meant to act as a guide to help explain the theories behind information literacy and the important threshold concepts that students must learn to incorporate into their thinking. 

The six threshold concepts that anchor the frames are (presented alphabetically):

• Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
• Information Creation as a Process
• Information Has Value
• Research as Inquiry
• Scholarship as Conversation
• Searching as Strategic Exploration

This has been a very popular lesson as of late, updating concepts which were normally branded as "Evaluating Content Online" or "Evaluating Websites."

Many of you may remember acronyms like the CRAAP test to help evaluate content.

These resources take those ideas one step further. 

An important idea to focus on is how to crosscheck an organization/news source/claim before believing or sharing information found online.

Naturally, an important consideration is bias. Students should also confirm whether the author is an authority on the subject  and whether or not the information conforms with other sources.

TED Talks have been instrumental in education, condensing information into a short, interesting package. They work very well for conveying various concepts related to information literacy.

Each lesson is broken down into 4 parts (Watch, Think, Dig Deeper, and Discuss). Think includes multiple choice questions based on the video shown in Watch. Dig Deeper provides additional resources to explore while Discuss includes guided and unguided discussions. 

With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart.

In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions for something called circular reporting. Noah Tavlin sheds light on this phenomenon.

Statistics are persuasive. So much so that people, organizations, and whole countries base some of their most important decisions on organized data. But any set of statistics might have something lurking inside it that can turn the results completely upside down. Mark Liddell investigates Simpson’s paradox.

The Writing Center is staffed by DelVal undergraduate peer tutors who help with writing assignments in all your courses. We view writing as a process that involves planning, reading, drafting, revising, and editing—writing with substance involves discovering your meaning through brainstorming, sharing, and getting lots of feedback.

Tutors help you gain a fresh perspective on the writing process, and can assist with any stage of the process:  choosing a topic or working through writer's block, generating ideas, creating an outline, sharpening a thesis, arranging and organizing paragraphs, citing correctly and fluently, editing grammar and mechanics, and more.

Instructors receive a copy of the tutor report completed during the session, to illustrate your engagement with the writing process and meeting the demands of writing across disciplines.

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