Laying the groundwork for information literacy at a research university

Abstract

Purpose -Information literacy (IL) is increasingly becoming an explicit learning outcome for college graduates, and some libraries are playing a role in planning and teaching IL instruction to students. Amidst the overall trend of shrinking budgets that libraries are experiencing, what strategies can be employed by libraries that support large universities to plan IL instruction? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach -Inspired by curriculum mapping, staff in the library assessment department created teaching maps which match the curriculum from seven colleges with the library's teaching efforts. To create them, they combined information about: first, courses that librarians have instructed over the last three years with; second, required courses for majors within the colleges; and third, typical enrollment for each course. Findings -Easily accessible information was combined to create the teaching maps, which enable the library to realign efforts to maximize IL instruction and best utilize library staff resources. Practical implications -Teaching maps serve as a portal to quickly understand majors, courses and course enrollment, and provide baseline information on past library instruction activity to inform future IL instruction strategy. Library directors and teaching staff are utilizing them to realign instruction efforts. Originality/value -Assessment strategies, such as curriculum mapping, serve not only the institution's teaching mission, but also help strategize for effective and efficient stewardship of staff resources. These methods will be useful for library directors, assessment and instruction librarians at large research universities.

When There’s No Information Literacy Requirement: Curriculum Mapping to Drive Engagement

“…16 It can also support communication with faculty, allowing librarians to target their specific needs, learning outcomes, and/or language, 17 or to advocate for greater information literacy integration on the basis of specific skills and previous demand for instruction. 18 More substantially, roadmapping can form a baseline for further work on information literacy integration in the curriculum, as at Cornell University. 19 Gessner & Eldermire used a "retrospective teaching map" as a means both to understand their teaching capacity (by inventorying their existing activities) and to identify where information literacy already fit into the academic curriculum.…”

“…Roadmapping, however, enabled librarians to quickly grasp (and reference as-needed) the various major programs, core requirements, history of information literacy instruction, and more, facilitating both effective use of staff resources and higher-level planning for their information literacy program. 21 There is also plenty of evidence in the literature of roadmapping being used as a preliminary step in a more-involved curriculum mapping project, or in conjunction with other techniques such as syllabus analysis. 22 Strategies such as roadmapping and syllabus analysis are necessarily fairly qualitative, but it can be difficult to accurately assess a program's reach and understand the program as a whole without quantitative information.…”

Using Curriculum Mapping to Understand Information Literacy in Political Science Curricula

“…This study analyzes core course enrollment, course offerings, degrees available, academic level, library instruction statistics, and other factors to provide an overview of how courses fit into degree paths and the university curriculum structure. 22 Further, Archambault and Masunaga's work shows librarians how to identify strategic courses to provide more effective, pedagogically supported instruction across multiple levels of alignment. 23 University and degree program alignments are a common educational practice that incorporates more critical, intensive, and successful principles from pedagogy and instructional design, areas in which librarians may lack education and training.…”

Graduate student intellectual journeys: a functional method to identify library service gaps

“…The project study required a close review of the movements students make as they work through a graduate degree. The study was initially guided by the curricular mapping practices (Castro Gessner and Eldermire, 2015) that have traditionally been used to track information literacy pathways in programs. In this context, the curricular mapping approach revealed itself too singular in scope and did not allow for a full examination of all facets of graduates’ experiences.…”