Teaching information skills effectively

Source Guided Tour

• Using examples of sources that would be appropriate for students to use in your course, provide an in-class guided tour or dissection of those sources.
• Identify and describe the characteristics of those publications. 
• Make explicit the form that credible voices will take (in your context). 

You Talking To Me?

• Identify readings that are in direct discourse with each other. This could take many forms: a newspaper editorial that argues with another editorial or other article; a scholar using twitter to critique a scholarly article or argue with other scholars; a letter to the editor from a scholarly journal.
• Make explicit the dynamic and conversational nature of academic discourse. It can be eye-opening for students to see examples of researchers (or other persons with differing perspectives) directly engaging with one another. 
• This snack-size taste of scholarly/serious dialogue can be easier to manage than a larger set of readings/voices. (See Finding Scholarly Conversations activity immediately below)

Finding Scholarly Conversations

• Revised “Find 10” or preliminary bibliography assignment
• Citation chains
• Students locate a small number of sources through library searching
• Locate 1 additional source from each of these using citations in articles and/or “cited by” features in library databases and Google Scholar

My voice, their voices

• Provide activities to gradually build the skills of summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quotations. Make explicit the rhetorical moves that are expected in academic writing.
• Before students can do research independently, it is enormously helpful for them to have a very clear sense of how to use their own writing to interact with others' perspectives. 
• With sources/texts that you provide, give students hours of experience in a sequence such as this: Highlighting the 1-2 most important concepts in a source; writing different length summaries of individual sources (as stepping stones to paraphrasing); share and explain common/useful structures for academic writing (e.g., “templates” from They say / I say); model good (and bad) direct quotation and paraphrasing examples.

Permission to Explore: 

• Student research doesn’t begin with a research question
• Students have different expectations of what it means to “research”
• Allow students to get familiar with topic and vocabulary
• Exploratory reading in scholarly encyclopedias and handbooks, textbooks
• Personal reflection freewrite: What do I know (and how do I know it)? What do I want to learn?

Freebrowse:

• Assign students the task of finding sources to explore multiple topics and to generate questions (NOT seek answers or evidence) 

Source/concept tables

• Can be used for note taking or synthesis
• Customizable to assignment/discipline
• Examples can be found in our workshop slideshow (see  tinyurl.com/tcnjhiddendepths).

Sources Side by Side

• [You might already] Assign several different source types (newspaper article, encyclopedia entry, book excerpt, journal article, blog entry, etc.) about the same topic
• Discuss the information attributes and nature of these with students
• Compare the information and approach conveyed by each
• Talk about how each source is created (and by/for whom) and how that affects the info provided as well as potential uses
• Ask students what question(s) each source could help them answer