To develop information literacy skills in chemistry and biochemistry majors at a primarily undergraduate institution, a multiyear collaboration between chemistry faculty and librarians has resulted in the establishment of a semester-long capstone project for Organic Chemistry II. Information literacy skills were instilled via a progressive research report, supported by a comprehensive modular virtual tutorial catered toward Rider University students, on the efficient use of SciFinder and related tasks for searching and using the primary literature. Over a six-year period, both the research report and the tutorial modules have been cyclically evaluated, assessed, and revised in order to meet our student learning objectives. This article describes the assessment-driven evolution of the research report assignment between 2010 and 2015, as well as student perceptions and learning outcomes. The technological development, feedback-driven revisions, and assessment of student learning outcomes of the SciFinder tutorial series have been included in a companion article in this Journal.

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This essay raises questions about the future of information literacy in higher education, given the prevalence of the Information Literacy Competency Standards in the library profession for the past 15 years, and the heated debate that took place regarding whether the Framework for Information Literacy and the Standards could harmoniously co-exist. We do not have answers to these questions, but we offer our perspectives on how the Standards have served academic librarians in the past and on how we envision the Framework and the Standards working together to further information literacy instruction. Our conclusion is that the Framework and the Standards serve different purposes and have different intended audiences and are thus both valuable to the profession.

Information literacy studies have shown that college students use a variety of information sources to perform research and commonly choose Internet sources over traditional library sources. Studies have also shown that students do not appear to understand the information quality issues concerning Internet information sources and may lack the information literacy skills to make good choices concerning the use of these sources. No studies currently provide clear guidance on how gender might influence the information literacy skills of students. Such guidance could help improve information literacy instruction. This study used a survey of college-aged students to evaluate a subset of student information literacy skills in relation to Internet information sources. Analysis of the data collected provided strong indications of gender differences in information literacy skills. Female respondents appeared to be more discerning than males in evaluating Internet sources. Males appeared to be more confident in the credibility and accuracy of the results returned by search engines. Evaluation of other survey responses strengthened our finding of gender differentiation in information literacy skills. ollege students today have come of age surrounded by a sea of information delivered from an array of sources available at their fingertips at any time of the day or night. Studies have shown that the most common source of information for college-aged students is the Internet. Information gathered in this environment is most likely found using a commercial search engine that returns sources of dubious quality using an unknown algorithm. The information in this environment is often fragmented, limited in depth and breadth, disorganized, biased, of unknown authorship, and, in some cases, not credible. It is unclear whether or not students discern these deficiencies in the information they encounter.

The impetus to incorporate instruction on the efficient and responsible practice of chemical information literacy into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum has become exceptionally urgent. At Rider University, Chemical Information Instruction (CII) has accordingly evolved from face-to-face sessions into online modules to embed information literacy skills into an Organic Chemistry II course. Through multiple methods of evaluation and assessment of student learning, the e-tutorial grew from a series of seven modules narrated by the science librarian, hosted on the University Libraries intranet, and created with labor intensive e-learning authoring software, into a series of 14 modules complete with detailed storyboards, narrated by the Organic Chemistry professor, hosted freely on the Internet, and created with simpler user-friendly software. This article describes the technological development, feedback-driven revisions, and assessment of student learning outcomes of this virtual tutorial series, while a companion article in this Journal addresses the execution and assessment of an accompanying capstone research report.