Library Homepage: Teaching Information Literacy: Additional Resources

Online Resources

Civic Online Reasoning
The Civic Online Reasoning curriculum is a set of free lessons and assessments designed to teach students how to evaluate online information effectively
Navigating Digital Information
Crash Course videos on navigating the internet
News Literacy Project
"The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit founded in 2008, is building a national movement to create systemic change in American education to ensure all students are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school, giving them the knowledge and ability to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers."
Citizen Literacy - University of Louisville (Ekstrom Library)
"Citizen Literacy is an online toolkit that promotes the development of key information skills for democratic citizenship and features short videos, handouts, and activities that faculty across all disciplines can integrate into their courses and assignments."

Additional Reading

Learning to evaluate: An intervention in civic online reasoning by Sarah McGrew
"This study reports on the results of an attempt to teach students to reason about online information. Students were taught strategies for evaluating digital content that were based on the practices of professional fact checkers."
Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait by Joel Breakstone, Mark Smith, Sam Wineburg, Amie Rapaport, Jill Carle, Marshall Garland, and Anna Saavedra
"Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them."
Mind the gap: Exploring differences between librarians’ and students’ perceptions of information literacy instruction by Heidi Julien, Melissa Gross, and Don Latham
"A study of information literacy instruction (ILI) practices in community college libraries in the United States has included a survey of instructional librarians and interviews with students."
Improving college students’ fact-checking strategies through lateral reading instruction in a general education civics course by Jessica E Brodsky, Patricia J. Brooks, Donna Scimeca, Todorova Ralitsa, Peter Galati, et al.
"College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort to teach students lateral reading strategies used by expert fact-checkers to verify online information."

Civic Preparation for the Digital Age by Joel Breakstone, Mark Smith, Nadav Ziv, and Sam Wineburg
From the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and originally published in the The Journal of Higher Education.
"Preparing students to evaluate online content, particularly as it concerns social and political issues, aligns with broader efforts to reinvigorate the civic mission of colleges and universities. We analyzed how college students (n = 263) evaluated online sources about public policy issues. Results showed that a majority employed ineffective strategies for evaluating digital information."