Developing best practices for international student information literacy instruction #ecil2018

Sean Stone from Indiana University school of dentistry library, which has around 110 students a year on 4 year program, and runs an international dentist program for around 14 students in each cohort. These students are qualified dentists already and come from a variety of country contexts. They have strong dental skills but lack knowledge of some other areas of the traditional dentistry course. They struggle with IL, and lack awareness of academic integrity as practices can be quite different in their home countries, and lack experience of using the information resources e.g. databases. The international students start their course in January, and have a much longer library orientation than home students, but then join in with the home students to study a module in evidence-based practice. It features individual and group work, and students are expected to search for quality information as part of this course. The library orientation became part of the module that was compulsory. Sara Lowe from the main campus library helped devise the curriculum that could be built on from the start of studies. The new session focused on active learning, and made a clearer distinction between IL and  evidence-based practice. Performance was better, but international students still struggled.  So they worked with another transition module to integrate IL into the learning. Collaboration between librarians and other professional groups really helped embed IL, and improve the support provided to students.