INFORMATION LITERACY IN THE GEOSCIENCES AT CARLETON COLLEGE: STRATEGIES AND ASSESSMENT

With support from an information literacy grant from the Mellon Foundation to Carleton College, members of the geology department held a three-day retreat to discuss our goals for information literacy and how to implement them into the geology curriculum. We developed a set of skills we expect geology students to acquire before they reach the senior thesis proposal stage. Because the geology curriculum at Carleton is non-hierarchical, we have no single course that deals with research methods including information literacy. Instead, projects and assignments that help our students become information-literate geoscientists are spread throughout the curriculum. One primary goal of these activities is to have the students meet with and get to know at least one of the reference librarians at the college. Students have thus been able to develop relationships with librarians as teachers, and librarians have been able to deliver individualized instruction, which is much more effective than traditional library instruction (lecture style, in the classroom). Our students learn to use and assess a variety of search techniques using web search engines and bibliographic tools available through the library. Several courses feature close reading of selected primary journal articles and student research projects. Our hope is that through these exercises our students become critical users of the vast amount of information (including data) that is available on-line and in print.

In order to assess our efforts in creating information literate geoscientists, we (geology faculty and research librarians) are currently working with Carleton’s Assessment Coordinator (Office of Institutional Research) to develop assessment tools and surveys that will be used in courses and to poll recent graduates. In addition, beginning with the 2003 class, our students are required to submit their senior thesis as a PDF file and their reference list as an EndNote® database file. These documents will be mined for a variety of data including number of references, number of citations per reference, and types of resources. This combination of self-reporting (surveys) and data mining of senior theses should help us track how information is being acquired and used by our students.