Teaching and Learning Information Synthesis: An Intervention and Rubric Based Assessment

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to determine how information synthesis skills can be taught effectively, and to discover how the level of synthesis in student writing can be effectively measured. The intervention was an information synthesis lesson that broke down the synthesis process into sequenced tasks. Researchers created a rubric which they used to assess students' levels of information synthesis demonstrated in their final research essays. A form of counting analysis was also created to see if other methods could help in measuring synthesis.Findings from the rubric analysis revealed that students appear to benefit from the synthesis lesson. The level of synthesis, however, remains low overall. In addition, the study showed that the different measures of synthesis established were able to identify different levels of information integration. Discovering effective ways to measure and teach synthesis continues to be essential in helping students become information literate. 60[ARTICLE]

Initial Development of the Perception of Information Literacy Scale (PILS)

“…Metaliteracy, or the ability to access, use, and create information in a networked and collaborative information environment, is an underlying concept in defining IL in the Framework (ACRL 2015; Jacobson & Mackey, 2013). In addition, this scale captures many aspects of information synthesis, the ability of an information creator to integrate existing information into a new information product (Lundstrom, Diekema, Leary, Haderlie, & Holliday, 2015). A student's ability to thoughtfully engage with information as an active creator and to acknowledge and identify themselves as information creators who possess agency within the information environment is an important aspect of IL (Jacobson & O'Keefe, 2014).…”

Learning how to synthesize: The design and evaluation of a reading-writing learning unit for high-school students

“…The first strategy involves writing down the most important information from every source text, in key words, on Post-it notes (different colors for the different source texts), and then organizing the notes (with information on the same subtopics, possibly from different sources), before writing a first draft. This strategy is based on the Color-Coding Method (Darowski et al, 2016;Lundstrom et al, 2015) and is most likely to meet the needs of students with a preference for prewriting planning. The second strategy involves immediately writing a rough draft, while simultaneously clustering and organizing information from different sources.…”

Performance and acceptance when using tablets as a multiple document learning tool: do application and guidance matter?

“…985-986). These forms of instruction ranged from guiding students in annotating and summarizing single texts (e.g., Hagerman 2017;Monte-Sano 2011) to organizing information from different texts graphically or spatially (e.g., Hilbert and Renkl 2008;Lundstrom et al 2015), with a large proportion of effective interventions also providing prompts or explicit instruction that encouraged or directed students to integrate information across documents (e.g., González-Lamas et al 2016;Maier and Richter 2014). According to Barzilai et al (2018), the most common ways to assess intertextual integration have been through written products (e.g., essays) and open-ended questions tasks.…”