Information Literacy Instruction: What Can We Learn from Reading and Writing Research #ecil2015

The first invited speaker today is Eero Sormunen, talking on: Information Literacy Instruction: What Can We Learn from Reading and Writing Research? at the European Conference on Information Literacy 2015.
He was motivated by the challenges of teaching information literacy in schools and by dissatisfaction with research silos (people being unwilling tolook outside their own discipline). He highlighted relevant work in education, some of which he was going to talk about more.
He went on to mention Kuhlthau's ISP model, and then showed his own model for information interactions in learning tasks. Elements were information environment, search interactions, source interaction and learning task (unfortunately since I'm still in the back row I couldn't capture the diagram).
Then Sormunen talked about research into reading multiple texts: "reading to write" studies (from the 1990s; e.g.looking at synthesising across texts, reading and writing as an integrated process) and later multiple text comprehension research on the internet (e.g. with a focus on evaluation and selection of information, synthesis across sources, constructing arguments). He moved on to research in online reading, mentioning particularly the work of Leu, who looked at information processing practice in online reading (e.g. this, or (thanks to Eero Sormunen) this). There was a cluster of reasons identified for reading e.g. to understand important questions, to evaluate information critically.
Another example given of online reading research was by Kiili, a qualitative study which identified various reading patterns in learners working in pairs on a task (e.g. co-construction of knowledge and meaning; individual construction of meaning; silent reading) (a quick search found what I think is the study he mentioned, and a similar study by the same author)
Then there were studies on epistemic thinking: people's ways of knowing, and conception of what knowledge is. He showed Kuhn's developmental model of epistemic beliefs and noted that there is current research into reading multiple documents and epistemic beliefs.
Sormunen finished by talking about his own research in this area, in particular the ARONI project: argumentative online inquiry in building students' knowledge work competencies. The home page for the whole research project is here: https://blogs.sis.uta.fi/aroni/
They are looking at information and school-based practices, as well as information literacy education. He is working with teams from educational research (with expertise in online reading, argumentation, knowledge work competencies, evaluation of teaching practices). You can find a little further information on the website that I just linked to: the project only just started. It aims to develop an instructional model for Finnish high schools.
(Some updates made 15 November)
Photo by Sheila Webber: front door  to my apartment in Tallinn old own, where I'm staying this week