Developing and Measuring Information Literacy
in Political Science Majors

Students (especially freshmen) have little knowledge of an academic source

• Many freshmen have black and white thinking
• Many use google search on the internet
  • Google searches are influenced by advertising and popularity

  • Many internet sites are not complete and have less information than an encyclopedia

Reasons why students do not do good academic research

1. Many are lazy
2. Many do not know what is available

Get students accustomed to going to the library

• Learn something unique to them
  • Put what they learned in the library into the classroom
• Are students with better research skills writing better papers?
  • Students are now finding too much information and must narrow it down

Students do not think they need to challenge the source

• They often do not know where the source is coming from
  • Example: Instead of getting a source about South Korea from South Korea, they will get a source from North Korea or a source from France talking about South Korea.
• Students do not stop and check to see what they found
  • Do not accept the first site that comes up in the search engine
  • Not always relevant to what is needed
    

Teach students to use critical thinking skills

• Discriminate sources
  • Do a dozen articles go back to the same source?
• What is a news agency versus a newspaper?
  • Newspapers can be valuable but it is not a primary source
  • Need multiple sources to have a complete picture

What to teach Political Science freshman

1. Research
2. News Analysis (how to apply research)
3. What is liberal democracy

Rearch Comptency Assessment

• Students were pre and post tested for their levels of information literacy
  • Met in the library each class one period per week for eight weeks
  • Each week was devoted to a particular resource or type of resource
    • i.e. scholary journal articles, news digests, newspapers, etc.
  • In class, the students were introduced to the resource(s), how and why it would be used, how to search it, and evaluate the results
    • Students then practiced using the resource themselves using a provided topic
  • After the class, each student was emailed a homework assignment to each student with a research question to be answered with the sources they learned that day.