Library Assignments for Critical Thinking and Information Literacy: Library Help

Librarians can:

• Help you design an assignment.
• Test the assignment and determine if resources are available.
• Discuss what databases and reference materials are available.
• Develop a research strategy for the assignment.
• Identify the best and/or newest information resources for your course goals.
• Collaborate on developing a library course guide.
• Provide course-related library instruction on specific resources and research strategies.
• Provide individual research consultations for your students.
• Give feedback about pitfalls or problems encountered after the assignment is finished.

Library staff can:

• Place materials on Reserve.

Faculty can:

• Meet with a librarian at the beginning of a semester to go over the syllabus and assignments.
• Provide copies of assignments to the reference librarians.
• Talk with a librarian about strategies to avoid plagiarism.
• Consider putting some materials on Reserve.
• Work with a librarian on an assessment tool.
• Break research assignments into manageable pieces with checkpoints along the way.
• Encourage students to find scholarly material through the article databases available on the library web website and cite them properly.
• Include the evaluation, analysis, and application of information as part of the research process.
• Clarify terminology with students (ex: magazine, journal, peer-reviewed) (ex: library database vs. Web).
• Arrange for a librarian to visit your classroom for a portion of a class (or schedule your class to visit the library) for a specific purpose (ex: demo a specific database; show how to do alerts or rss feeds from library databases; demo how to use an online citation manager; teach APA or MLA citation styles; etc.)