HOT TOPICS IN GLOBAL WARMING: AN INFORMATION LITERACY PROJECT FOR A LARGE GENERAL EDUCATION EARTH SCIENCE COURSE

A project focusing on recent research in climate science was developed for a large general education Earth Science course at the 2007 JMU Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning Workshop (http://www.lib.jmu.edu/gened/). The goal of this project was for each student to write a newsletter article that communicated results from a peer-reviewed climate change study in an understandable, interesting way to their fellow students and the general public.

This project was implemented in Fall 2007 in two lecture sections with a combined total of 227 students. The first part of the project asked students to locate four resources, including a peer-reviewed scientific research article found in the bibliography of the 2007 IPCC Working Group II Report (Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, http://www.ipcc-wg2.org/). We gave a 30 minute presentation in class on how to locate scholarly journals, government documents, and other materials using the JMU library website. Each student turned in a worksheet on which they listed their four resources, explained why they chose their topic, and described the “angle” they planned to use for their newsletter article. Students shared the content of their newsletter articles in small groups in class on the due date. Some students also chose to upload articles onto a publicly available Wiki (http://ipccclimatechange.pbwiki.com/). The newsletter articles were evaluated using a rubric to streamline the grading process.

Students provided feedback at the end of the semester through an online questionnaire. Many said they enjoyed the experience and appreciated the chance to explore their own climate interests in a large course. A significant minority of students remained unsure about how to locate library resources and unclear about the definition of a peer-reviewed scientific journal article. Based on these responses, the first part of the project now focuses on locating the peer-reviewed scientific journal article and understanding the hypotheses, data, and conclusions from that article. The revised project will be used in a 100-student class in Spring 2008. We plan to present a detailed discussion of how to locate scholarly journal articles online, and students will edit drafts of their news articles in class in groups.