Transforming Information Literacy Instruction-Amanda Maynard & Vivian B Milczarski

2014 CT Information Literacy Conference-June 13, 2014
Manchester Community College
Great Path, Manchester, CT 06040

Amanda M. Maynard
Amanda Maynard is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY. She teaches General Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Experimental Psychology courses.

Vivian B. Milczarski
Vivian B. Milczarski is an Assistant Librarian for Collection Development at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY. She serves as liaison to Business, Psychology and Political Science programs.

Engaging students in traditional information literacy (IL) instruction during which a librarian demonstrates IL skills in the classroom can be difficult. Students may not pay attention to instruction believing that it is unrelated to their coursework and to their lives. In addition, students may be overconfident in their technological skills, confusing these skills with IL skills. To address these issues, we collaboratively developed a stepwise approach to IL instruction using case studies for Psychology majors in a research methods course. In this presentation, we will discuss how we co-teach using a case study embedded within the course content to help students develop both their IL skills (i.e., website evaluation, systematic literature search) and their metacognitive skills (i.e., setting up and monitoring their own information seeking behaviors). The advantages and disadvantages of the technique, along with the application of this technique to IL instruction in other disciplines, will be discussed.