$50.00
8½" x 11" · Spiral-bound
Includes supplementary materials on disk

ISBN 0-9652711-9-6
© 2004

Empowering Students II: Teaching Information Literacy Concepts with Hands-on and Minds-on Activities

Carol Anne Germain and Deborah Bernnard, Editors
Active Learning Series, no. 8

From the Editors | Table of Contents
Sample Lesson Plan (260K, PDF) | Order this Book

From the Editors

Coloring, talking in chat rooms, describing a Coke bottle – do these activities seem like a long stretch from library instruction? While untraditional, these exercises and similar ones are included in lesson plans in the forthcoming Empowering Students II. This collection is a librarian's book of good active learning exercises to help and empower students with learning the basic concepts of information literacy. In this publication we highlight activities that foster and encourage critical thinking. These lesson plans focus on teaching conceptual and transferable information literacy skills using activities that provide hands-on as well as minds-on experiences.

This book, like others published in this series, is designed to serve as a repository of ideas for classes and assignments that instructors can use pretty much as is. The book is spiral bound to make it easy to photocopy. Additional materials are provided on disk so that instructors can modify and print what they need to teach the class or to give as an assignment. Permission is given for individual librarians or classroom teachers to reproduce the activities for classroom use.

So get your crayons ready!

Table of Contents

35 lesson plans in 5 sections

Section 1: Group Activities
  • Processing Information: Understanding the How, Where, and Why of Information Resources
  • Learning Library Resources: Discovering and Comparing Your Choices
  • Dissecting a Database
  • Brainstorming Keywords for Research Topics in Psychology
  • Indexes for Psychology: How to Choose Them, How to Use Them
  • Western Music to 1750
  • Integrating Citation Method into Information Literacy Instruction
  • Finding Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Periodicals
  • Critical Exploration of Periodical Indexes: A Lesson Plan for Active Learning
  • "The Flow of Information:" Understanding How Scholarly Information Is Created and Organized
  • First-Year Web Searching
Section 2: Case-Based Activities
  • Information Needs Scenarios
  • The Scientific Research Process
  • Evaluating and Including Government Publications in Your Research
  • "Real World" Plagiarism Case Studies
  • The Politics of Copyright as Learned through Legislative Histories
  • Ethics of "Real World" Information Seeking & Use
  • Critically Thinking about the News
  • "Reading" Texts-Connecting to Research through Art and Artifacts: A Course-Integrated Information Literacy Lesson Plan
Section 3: Librarian-Led Activities
  • Evaluating Your Search Results: On the Road to the Good Stuff
  • International Business Research: Defining Information Needs
  • Empowering Student Groups with Games
  • Developing Keywords
  • Internet Sources Versus Subscription Sources
  • Know Your Library Treasures
  • The Why, When and How of Citing Sources using MLA
  • Visualizing the Internet
Section 4: Debunking Activities
  • Web Evaluation Class
  • Plagiarism Detectives
  • Scientific Discovery as Portrayed in Popular Media
Section 5: Empowering Through Assessment
  • "Thumbs Up, Thumbs in the Middle"
  • Understanding Controlled Languages
  • Information Literacy Self Assessment
  • Research Log
  • The Research Process: Getting into the "Flow"