This is Pam McKinney blogging the keynote focused on Stephen's 20-year journey investigating information literacy in the context of his teaching in politics. In the early 2000s, Stephen was working as a politics lecturer and noticed that students weren't just using material from the reading list but were going "off-piste" with their information sources. However often the sources used weren't very suitable, they were poor quality sources found on the internet. He was introduced to the concept of information literacy and recognised the value of this for both himself and his students. He started including some information literacy teaching in his modules, supported by the university librarians. This demonstrated the value of partnership working between academics and librarians to develop students' information literacy. The SCONUL Seven Pillars model informed the development of assessed tasks to support information literacy e.g. asking students to reflect on the process of writing their essays. However, some students had negative feedback about these assessments and found this aspect of their assessment tedious.
Stephen used a questionnaire with first-year students to try to evaluate their information literacy, including questions on how students assessed the quality of their sources. However, the students didn't really show any improvement between 2009 and 2017, which was disheartening, and brought into question some of the promises made about the value of information literacy development. The paradox is that the more complex and sophisticated information literacy becomes as a concept, the more unlikely it is to be used by academics in the classroom. Stephen was disheartened and was considering ceasing his information literacy work.
Then he developed a partnership with a colleague, Doug Atkinson, who specialised in quantitative research and tried to establish a link between advanced levels of information literacy and better academic performance. They conducted a citation analysis of student work and established that more high-quality citations in an essay lead to higher grades, e,g. each high-quality journal article cited equalled 1 extra mark, if a government policy paper was cited, that led to a 2 mark increase. They distributed a questionnaire to politics lecturers and discovered that less than half of the respondents included and explicit information literacy education in their classrooms, and only 27% had invited a librarian to contribute. Research with postgraduate politics students has revealed that only a minority (36.1%) claimed that they had had any information literacy training, and emulation of "professors" is a successful information strategy. Wikipedia was a popular source for students, but they knew that their lecturers didn't like them to cite it as a source in their work.
There are signs from the political science pedagogical literature that there is increasing recognition of the value of information literacy development, some of it co-authored with librarians. Most of this literature is published in the United States. The rise of the use of Generative AI has scared academics, and perhaps provides a window of opportunity for librarians to promote information literacy teaching.
Photo by Pam McKinney: Exhibition banner at the Cardiff Museum
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