Information Literacy in the Sciences: Faculty Perception of Undergraduate Student Skill

Abstract

Academic librarians need reliable information on the needs of faculty teaching undergraduates about seeking and using information. This study describes information gathered from semistructured interviews of teaching faculty in the sciences from several Boston-area colleges. The interview results provided insight into science faculty attitudes toward student research skill and ability. Faculty articulated what they wanted from students seeking research articles, including finding where the gaps were. They described their concerns about threats to research integrity including conflicts of interest and Open Access publishing. Study results will prove useful for librarians trying to better serve the needs of their science faculty.In a recent lecture, Paul Sturges recounted a story about the gap between perception and user needs, which inspired this study. A development organization in Zimbabwe created toilets for a village; returning to the village some time later, they discovered they had been converted to grain stores.1 The development experts perceived a need for toilets, but the villagers needed grain stores, an error easily avoided by asking users about their needs. Instruction librarians sometimes make the same type of error. Librarians can approach information literacy instruction with their own perception of the type of instruction the students need without fully understanding the needs of faculty or students in the discipline. Additional information about what faculty expect from instruction will assist librarians in providing students with disciplineappropriate instruction.Information literacy (IL) is viewed as an essential skill for college students; it is defined as "a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information."2 The IL competencies can be seen as generic skills, consistent across disciples or specific skills within a disciplinary lens. The standards themselves use both the language of universality and discipline specificity.3 While the best way to achieve IL competency for students is through collaboration between disciplinary faculty and librarians, collaboration is not always seen in all situations. 4 The Association of College and Research Libraries has recently developed the Frameworks for Information Literacy

Through Faculty's Eyes: Teaching Threshold Concepts and the Framework

“…32 Heather Perry's study in 2017 also found this to be true: faculty placed less emphasis on how students located and accessed information, explaining that they were most concerned with the students' ability to differentiate between primary and secondary sources. 33 To these faculty members, IL was seen as the ability to question the literature, critique the research, and identify relevant primary sources. These studies all reflect a conception of IL that is connected to a more subjective research and critical thinking process, rather than to a specific skill set that teaches students how to search for and assess information.…”

The Status of Women in STEM in Higher Education: A Review of the Literature 2007–2017

“…Not only does this outreach help position librarians as educators in the campus community but these activities also contribute to the institution's learning mission. There is a strong body of literature that supports information literacy as a skill that serves both undergraduate and graduate STEM students (Perry 2016;Simonsen, Sare, and Bankston 2017;Spackman 2007;Van Lacum, Ossevoort, and Goedhart 2014) and it will not be expanded on here. Librarians are embedded in courses throughout the semester (FerrerVinent 2016;Mandernach and Reisner 2012;Pritchard 2010) and help scaffold curriculum (Mitchell 2014;Scarmozzino 2010).…”

Making sense of librarian-led information literacy instruction

“…Perry (2017), who studied the perception undergraduate faculty have on information literacy, found that faculty used a variety of techniques to teach information literacy. Similar to Perry's (2017) findings, the participants taught information literacy through direct instruction, scaffolded assignments and by engaging in librarian-led information literacy instruction.…”