Photo by Flickr user Hammer51012

Pic­ture it, a higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion, 2009. The sun is shin­ing. It’s a warm sum­mer day. Your iced cof­fee per­spires on the desk in front of you. You are a fac­ulty librar­ian par­tic­i­pat­ing in a work­shop with other fac­ulty mem­bers on outcomes-based assess­ment for teach­ing and learn­ing. You’re excited to make the leap from rou­tine library ori­en­ta­tions to in-class assign­ments cen­tered around infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy con­cepts, which will help improve your instruc­tional ses­sions and place stu­dents on the con­tin­uum towards mas­tery of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy con­cepts. Sud­denly, the con­ver­sa­tion turns to the topic of the learn­ing out­come for infor­ma­tion literacy.

“How is infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy any dif­fer­ent from crit­i­cal thinking?”

“Couldn’t we just get rid of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy since it shares sim­i­lar out­comes with crit­i­cal thinking?”

Wait, what?!?

Imme­di­ately, your head starts reel­ing with the national stan­dards of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Col­lege and Research Libraries, var­i­ous statewide ini­tia­tives that have mobi­lized to embed infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy into k-12 and higher edu­ca­tion cur­ricu­lum, and indi­vid­ual fac­ulty with whom you have worked with to cover these very same stan­dards as part of their learn­ing out­comes for their students.

As you wit­ness this debate unfold­ing, you think to your­self, what is the dif­fer­ence between crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy? Do they share some com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics? Is it pos­si­ble for one to exist with­out the other?

How would you respond to this chal­lenge, where there are shared out­comes among infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal thinking?

The goal of the assessment-based learn­ing out­come is to iden­tify one nec­es­sary skill, such as team­work, crit­i­cal think­ing, or com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the stu­dent will use on the job, in their daily lives, or in the next stage of their edu­ca­tional process. This learn­ing out­come is then embed­ded in an assign­ment or through­out the cur­ricu­lum, and a scor­ing rubric is devised to focus on increas­ing stu­dent com­pe­tency in this skill. This rubric allows for a quan­ti­ta­tive value to be given to com­pleted assign­ments rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the student’s appli­ca­tion of the skill and helps place them on the com­pe­tency con­tin­uum some­where between a basic, on the low-end of the scale, and advanced, on the high-end, which pro­vides a great oppor­tu­nity to make sure stu­dents are “get­ting it.” This process also engages both instruc­tors and stu­dents in a teach­ing and learn­ing part­ner­ship. By empha­siz­ing the mas­tery of key learn­ing out­comes at your insti­tu­tion stu­dents will be pre­pared for a post-graduate work­place environment.

It is impor­tant to ask this ques­tion: Is it pos­si­ble for crit­i­cal think­ing to take the place of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy in today’s dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion uni­verse? In this post I’ll be look­ing at infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing as com­po­nents of assess­ment. How is crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy inter­twined in the assess­ment of stu­dent learn­ing? What other types of lit­era­cies are required for today’s stu­dent? Why is infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy crit­i­cal to stu­dent learning?

Infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing: An acci­den­tal marriage?

To begin, we should estab­lish some com­mon ground on the def­i­n­i­tion of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy. The Asso­ci­a­tion of Col­lege & Research Libraries (ACRL) out­lines the major com­pe­tency areas for the infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate individual:

• Deter­mine the extent of infor­ma­tion needed
• Access the needed infor­ma­tion effec­tively and efficiently
• Eval­u­ate infor­ma­tion and its sources critically
• Incor­po­rate selected infor­ma­tion into one’s own knowl­edge base
• Use infor­ma­tion effec­tively to accom­plish a spe­cific purpose
• Under­stand the eco­nomic, legal, and social issues sur­round­ing the use of infor­ma­tion, and access and use infor­ma­tion eth­i­cally and legally [[1]]

These stan­dards out­lined by ACRL have been inte­grated into eval­u­a­tion rubrics used by instruc­tional librar­i­ans across the nation in lev­els K-12 through higher edu­ca­tion. While there is vari­a­tion in the lan­guage and pre­sen­ta­tion used to express these com­pe­ten­cies, infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy assess­ment closely fol­lows these stan­dards. One such exam­ple of a higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion is McK­endree Uni­ver­sity, which has its very own on-line, inter­ac­tive infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy rubric. [[2]] Devel­op­ing and using a rubric for infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy can help place an indi­vid­ual or group of stu­dents on the infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy con­tin­uum, where a stu­dent may come into the instruc­tional ses­sion scor­ing low, or begin­ning, and leave the instruc­tional ses­sion scor­ing some­where in the mid­dle to high range, or mas­ter­ing. Through this process, we can gauge a student’s mas­tery of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy con­cepts and mea­sure the effects of the instruc­tional ses­sion on stu­dent learn­ing. It is impor­tant to remem­ber that when stu­dents hear the word “assess­ment,” this nat­u­rally inspires a lot of fear. They are con­cerned about hav­ing to take a test, turn in a paper, or engage in some form of an aca­d­e­mic assign­ment. While fear may be a real­ity for most stu­dents, it is equally impor­tant to remem­ber that these eval­u­a­tion rubrics are also an assess­ment of the instruc­tional librar­ian. They are tools for improv­ing both learn­ing and teach­ing, and pro­vide very use­ful met­rics for iden­ti­fy­ing future teach­ing opportunities.

Sim­i­lar to infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, crit­i­cal think­ing has its own set of com­pe­ten­cies. One of the lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions in pro­vid­ing a foun­da­tion for the assess­ment of crit­i­cal think­ing, Foun­da­tion for Crit­i­cal Think­ing breaks this down into eight dis­crete ele­ments:

• Gen­er­ates purposes
• Raises ques­tions
• Uses infor­ma­tion
• Uti­lizes concepts
• Makes infer­ences
• Makes assump­tions
• Gen­er­ates implications
• Embod­ies a point of view [[3]]

Crit­i­cal think­ing, as its own unique form of assess­ment, aims to get stu­dents to dis­tin­guish between empir­i­cal and fac­tual evi­dence by apply­ing higher order think­ing to their own men­tal processes of receiv­ing, tak­ing apart, and syn­the­siz­ing infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion, stu­dents bal­ance all of this with an aware­ness of their own sub­jec­tive judg­ment. Assign­ments cre­ated with the learn­ing out­come of crit­i­cal think­ing in mind strive to cre­ate a fair and bal­anced out­come and par­al­lels sim­i­lar skills that will be required for future prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion. In their arti­cle on the impor­tance of this out­come for grad­u­ate and expe­ri­enced nurses, Fero, et. al directly link crit­i­cal think­ing to patient safety: “Nurses must have the abil­ity to rec­og­nize changes in patient con­di­tion, per­form inde­pen­dent nurs­ing inter­ven­tions, antic­i­pate orders and pri­or­i­tize.” [[4]] Focus­ing on the crit­i­cal think­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of “inter­pre­ta­tion, analy­sis, eval­u­a­tion, infer­ence, expla­na­tion, and self-regulation,” Fero, et al., argue that using a crit­i­cal think­ing frame­work in nurs­ing edu­ca­tion will bear directly on the nurse in their post-graduate nurs­ing expe­ri­ences. [[5]] This study included an exer­cise that pre­sented nurs­ing stu­dents with video­taped sce­nar­ios in a clin­i­cal set­ting and then asked them to record, in writ­ing, their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the prob­lem and nec­es­sary action steps for the res­o­lu­tion. Even though this case study incor­po­rates sit­u­a­tions aimed to exer­cise the crit­i­cal think­ing skills of its stu­dent mem­ber­ship, there are points at which infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy com­pe­ten­cies come into play. This is a per­fect exam­ple of an inher­ent col­lu­sion between crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, as the sce­nar­ios pre­sented in these video­tapes require eval­u­a­tion of visual infor­ma­tion and crit­i­cal think­ing, which will then lead to an under­stand­ing of the infor­ma­tion needed to resolve these problems.

If pro­fes­sional dis­ci­plines, such as nurs­ing, look to spe­cific com­pe­ten­cies for grad­u­ates enter­ing the work­force, then edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions should meet this same need by embed­ding com­pe­ten­cies in the cur­ricu­lum. For exam­ple, Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­sity has cod­i­fied crit­i­cal think­ing for its stu­dent and fac­ulty mem­ber­ship, by cre­at­ing an online Crit­i­cal and Inte­gra­tive Think­ing Rubric. It serves as an institution-wide foun­da­tion for learn­ing assess­ment across dis­ci­plines. [[6]] Sim­i­lar to the infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy rubric, instruc­tors use these tem­plates as com­pe­tency mod­els, and mod­ify exist­ing crit­i­cal think­ing rubrics tai­lored to spe­cific assign­ments. A class taught at WSU on inves­ti­ga­tions into the arts, manip­u­lated the exist­ing base­line of the Crit­i­cal and Inte­gra­tive Think­ing Rubric to achieve its own crit­i­cal think­ing out­come for its course. These mal­leable rubrics are very use­ful in stan­dard­iz­ing learn­ing out­comes and set­ting clear guide­lines for stu­dents to fol­low. Pre­sent­ing and fol­low­ing a scor­ing rubric with an assign­ment can also take a lot of the sub­jec­tive eval­u­a­tion out of assess­ment and point stu­dents toward clearly stated goals.

Until death us do part

Clearly, there is a shared rela­tion­ship between infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing. Crit­i­cal think­ing comes into play when get­ting stu­dents on the path to look­ing at infor­ma­tion and using it judi­ciously in light of their topic. Library infor­ma­tion instruc­tion ses­sions have been fol­low­ing a trend which seeks to blend these two together, get­ting stu­dents to look at web­sites, arti­cles, media items, and other online con­tent with a crit­i­cal eye toward eval­u­at­ing these sources for credibility.

Library instruc­tion incor­po­rates brain­storm­ing or con­cept map­ping into ses­sions, pro­vid­ing stu­dents with a cre­ative approach to gen­er­at­ing a pur­pose for their assign­ment. Increas­ing num­bers of instruc­tional librar­i­ans also devote time to the eval­u­a­tion of infor­ma­tion, which ulti­mately takes stu­dents out of the pre-packaged box of research data­bases and into the fron­tier of the freely avail­able infor­ma­tion online. Ellie Col­lier in her post, In Praise of the Inter­net: Shift­ing Focus and Engag­ing Crit­i­cal Think­ing Skills, touches upon this very rela­tion­ship exist­ing between infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing. She encour­ages instruc­tional librar­i­ans every­where, “to shift our pri­mary focus away from teach­ing how to find infor­ma­tion and towards engag­ing crit­i­cal think­ing skills.” [[7]] This does not mit­i­gate the need for the infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy com­pe­tency, when in fact both of these com­pe­ten­cies live in per­fect har­mony. Both crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy work together in a part­ner­ship, each lean­ing on and sup­port­ing the other. Li Zhang points to this very rela­tion­ship between these two com­pe­ten­cies, stating:

An infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate stu­dent will be able to for­mu­late research queries and cre­ate search strate­gies that reflect an under­stand­ing of infor­ma­tion sources and their orga­ni­za­tion, ana­lyze the data col­lected for value, and ulti­mately incor­po­rate the data to solve prob­lems. This lit­er­acy or com­pe­tency goes beyond sim­ply acquir­ing knowl­edge; it involves the process of crit­i­cal think­ing, which empha­sizes rea­son­ing, form­ing judg­ment about the evi­dence, and deter­min­ing when new infor­ma­tion must be gen­er­ated. Since infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing are so closely related, it is the job of librar­i­ans who are also edu­ca­tors to go beyond merely pro­vid­ing lec­tures, but strive to cul­ti­vate stu­dents’ think­ing skills in order to equip them with nec­es­sary strate­gies to cope with com­plex prob­lems. [[8]]

Work­ing with stu­dents to fos­ter a cohe­sive, give-and-take rela­tion­ship between crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy will rein­force their post-graduate skills. As Zhang sug­gests, engag­ing stu­dents in that grey area between infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing will fos­ter direct engage­ment with infor­ma­tion, and help them make con­nec­tions between their research needs and the infor­ma­tion avail­able to meet those needs. Specif­i­cally, Zhang focuses on the fol­low­ing: com­par­ing and cri­tiquing web­sites for cred­i­bil­ity; encour­ag­ing stu­dents to come up with their own stan­dards of eval­u­a­tion; using spe­cific search strate­gies for online and data­base search­ing; and ulti­mately focus­ing on trans­fer­ence of skills between web and data­base search­ing. If you are an instruc­tional librar­ian who loves to get your stu­dents think­ing and talk­ing about infor­ma­tion, then you already know it is impos­si­ble to draw a clear line between infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal thinking.

Open­ing up the relationship

Increas­ingly, infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy has become a national con­cern, stem­ming from a rapidly chang­ing infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy land­scape. This includes print and elec­tronic con­tent, pho­tographs, videos, pod­casts, blogs, gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, cor­po­rate records, insti­tu­tional archives, and infor­ma­tion for­mats yet to be defined. The con­cern for infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy has had a long his­tory, punc­tu­ated by dif­fer­ent modal­i­ties: media, tech­nol­ogy, com­puter, and cul­tural lit­er­acy. [[9]] To this list could be added mul­ti­me­dia, dig­i­tal, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and social media lit­er­acy. Infor­ma­tion literacy’s best friend, ACRL, draws a clear line between infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, stat­ing that “[infor­ma­tion] tech­nol­ogy skills enable an indi­vid­ual to use com­put­ers, soft­ware appli­ca­tions, data­bases, and other tech­nolo­gies to achieve a wide vari­ety of aca­d­e­mic, work-related, and per­sonal goals.” [[10]] Sim­i­lar to the shared rela­tion­ship between crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, much of these alter­nate lit­era­cies can rein­force and pro­vide added dimen­sion to the infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy com­pe­tency and cre­ate crit­i­cal skills for the 21^st cen­tury stu­dent. As infor­ma­tion rapidly changes in appear­ance and con­tent, it is of import for infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy to be a part of the con­ver­sa­tion regard­ing other lit­er­acy modalities.

The land­scape of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy is chang­ing, and these 21^st cen­tury skills will also change the way stu­dents access, eval­u­ate, incor­po­rate, and use infor­ma­tion effec­tively. Per­haps now and in the future, writ­ing research papers may not be the pri­mary method of stu­dent assess­ment at every higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion, and may not always coin­cide with every insti­tu­tions mis­sion for its stu­dent mem­ber­ship; how­ever, in an increas­ingly net­worked world the neces­sity for an infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy learn­ing out­come is para­mount. Beyond equip­ping stu­dents to inter­act with and use tech­nolo­gies effec­tively, being able to nav­i­gate information-rich envi­ron­ments is critical.

Infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy: All by myself…

The neces­sity for class­room embed­ded infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy skills is unavoid­able. When nav­i­gat­ing dif­fer­ent user groups (e.g., com­mu­nity col­lege asso­ci­a­tions, library asso­ci­a­tions, local library coun­cils, and national library asso­ci­a­tions) the feel­ings on the topic of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy is sim­i­lar: “To be infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate, a per­son must be able to rec­og­nize when infor­ma­tion is needed and have the abil­ity to locate, eval­u­ate, and use effec­tively the needed infor­ma­tion.” [[11]] Even as infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy bears strong ties to crit­i­cal think­ing, it must be able to stand alone as its own com­pe­tency, by hold­ing its own and be given equal rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the assess­ment of teach­ing and learning.

Higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions have taken a stand on the impor­tance of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, ema­nat­ing stan­dards and guide­lines for the infor­ma­tion com­pe­tent indi­vid­ual from state and local gov­ern­ment. The Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Com­mu­nity Col­leges (AACC) has made their stance on infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy very clear:

Infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, which encom­passes infor­ma­tion flu­ency and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy mas­tery, is crit­i­cal to suc­cess in higher edu­ca­tion and life­long learn­ing. Rapid and con­tin­ual changes in tech­nol­ogy and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of infor­ma­tion resources present stu­dents with an abun­dance of infor­ma­tion through a vari­ety of vet­ted and unvet­ted for­mats. This wide vari­ety of choices raises ques­tions about the reli­a­bil­ity, authen­tic­ity, and valid­ity of con­tent and poses chal­lenges for stu­dents try­ing to eval­u­ate, under­stand, and apply the infor­ma­tion.  The Asso­ci­a­tion of Col­lege and Research Libraries, in its Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Com­pe­tency Stan­dards for Higher Edu­ca­tion, notes that infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy is con­sid­ered a key out­come by sev­eral regional and discipline-specific accred­i­ta­tion bod­ies because of its close ties to stu­dents’ com­pe­tency with eval­u­at­ing, man­ag­ing, and using infor­ma­tion .… An impor­tant ele­ment of both teach­ing and learn­ing in today’s infor­ma­tion age is infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy — the set of skills needed to find, access, retrieve, ana­lyze, syn­the­size and use infor­ma­tion effec­tively and eth­i­cally. [[12]]

As dis­cussed, infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy is chang­ing, as is the ter­rain of teach­ing and learn­ing in higher edu­ca­tion. Among the cur­rent changes, peer-reviewed and trade jour­nals are con­sis­tently mov­ing to an online for­mat, news­pa­pers are scal­ing back print pro­duc­tion to pur­sue an elec­tronic future, mobile devices are being used to access and nav­i­gate online infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments, iPhone apps are being cre­ated daily from a vari­ety of cre­ators, blogs and wikis are rapidly being cre­ated by both indi­vid­u­als and large-scale orga­ni­za­tions, and edu­ca­tional con­tent is shift­ing to open source envi­ron­ments. Stu­dents encounter infor­ma­tion in their daily lives when they drop by the super­mar­ket to pick up gro­ceries, when they sit down to watch tele­vi­sion or stream media con­tent on their com­put­ers, or when they engage in the task of media cre­ation. First and fore­most, this is all information.

Crit­i­cal think­ing and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy rubrics, as they are typ­i­cally laid out, are very sim­i­lar. How­ever, crit­i­cal think­ing is rooted in devel­op­ing a thought process that occurs around a vari­ety of life skills related to inter­act­ing and engag­ing with infor­ma­tion. Infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy has a marked depar­ture from crit­i­cal think­ing. This hap­pens when edu­cat­ing stu­dents about the types and for­mats of infor­ma­tion and tech­nolo­gies that exist, and get­ting them to think about infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy con­cepts in the aggre­gate. For exam­ple, we might empha­size, this is word pro­cess­ing, not, this is Microsoft Word 2007. Or this is a search inter­face, not, this is a research data­base. Increas­ing infor­ma­tion com­pe­tency equips stu­dents with the skills to effi­ciently nav­i­gate and gather req­ui­site infor­ma­tion they will need in the work­force. Out in the “real world,” stu­dents are not likely to be pre­sented with a Google search box dur­ing every work task. Instead they will be required to use a vari­ety of search inter­faces to get at the infor­ma­tion they need to address the prob­lem at hand, and be able to eval­u­ate the cred­i­bil­ity of those sources. They will need to be able to cre­ate workarounds when their infor­ma­tion strate­gies fail them. They must be able to locate, gather, eval­u­ate, syn­the­size, and respon­si­bly use infor­ma­tion. This process is markedly dif­fer­ent from crit­i­cal think­ing, which often empha­sizes thought processes around infor­ma­tion, sit­u­a­tions, inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, project-based work, and other aspects.

Infor­ma­tion comes in a vari­ety of for­mats and is needed not only for writ­ing research papers, cre­at­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, but is a crit­i­cal skill in deal­ing with day-to-day per­sonal prob­lems and issues. In an impor­tant study by Project Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy (PIL) facil­i­tated by the Infor­ma­tion School at Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton, researchers found that stu­dents were frus­trated equally when “con­duct­ing research, whether for course assign­ments or every­day life prob­lems, [pre­sent­ing] its own set of chal­lenges that are usu­ally exac­er­bated in dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments. Chal­lenges are often deep-seated frus­tra­tions tied to find­ing resources stu­dents know exist, some­how, some­where, but are unable to access.” [[13]] One rem­edy can be found in a problem-based approach to the infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing process, a process that can suc­cess­fully be car­ried out through infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy. By involv­ing higher order think­ing skills stu­dents see the con­nec­tion between the skills they acquire in the edu­ca­tional set­ting and how they can be applied in their every­day lives. Guided instruc­tion on how to nav­i­gate a com­plex infor­ma­tion land­scape would greatly improve a student’s abil­ity to appro­pri­ately iden­tify and nav­i­gate infor­ma­tion, and bet­ter equip them to amass infor­ma­tion if a defin­i­tive infor­ma­tion gap is found. Devel­op­ing infor­ma­tion seek­ing strate­gies that meet real-life, every­day sit­u­a­tions cre­ates a nat­ural bridge to work­force train­ing, pro­vid­ing stu­dents with an invalu­able set of skills sim­i­lar to crit­i­cal think­ing, but inde­pen­dently valu­able in its own right.

Rekin­dling the old flame

Library instruc­tion ses­sions need to remain open to inte­grat­ing crit­i­cal think­ing skills, as well as other learn­ing out­comes and lit­er­acy modal­i­ties, in the k-12 and higher edu­ca­tion set­ting. This prac­tice can make infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy rel­e­vant and test the met­tle of this skill set in the edu­ca­tional envi­ron­ment. In the process of engag­ing stu­dents, we can find out what they think about infor­ma­tion on a per­sonal level as they inter­act with it in their daily lives. Once we push stu­dents to “fig­ure it out,” begin to stir their cre­ative and intel­lec­tual fac­ul­ties, we can start mov­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for­ward. While infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing share a con­tigu­ous and insep­a­ra­ble rela­tion­ship, one can­not exist with­out the other. With­out infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, stu­dents would find them­selves equipped to think about sit­u­a­tions and ideas, but inca­pable of rec­og­niz­ing and under­stand­ing the vast infor­ma­tion net­work or how to access this net­work. Alter­nately, with­out crit­i­cal think­ing we would have vast amounts of infor­ma­tion with no way to fil­ter, gather, or syn­the­size this information.

It is also impor­tant for instruc­tional librar­i­ans in an edu­ca­tional con­text to be involved in the devel­op­ment of an infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy rubric. In the course of devel­op­ing such a rubric, we can pro­vide our instruc­tional peers with a tem­plate for eval­u­at­ing infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy in their own class­rooms, as well as our own. In addi­tion, mod­i­fy­ing exist­ing rubrics at your insti­tu­tion can be an invalu­able test of the impact of your teach­ing and show you if stu­dents are truly “get­ting it.” Such a ven­ture might also help inte­grate you more into instruc­tion and allow stu­dents and instruc­tional peers to see you as more than just the cool librar­ian with the book cart.

Along with crit­i­cal think­ing, infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy should be offered with the same fre­quency as other teach­ing and learn­ing assess­ments in the edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion. It touches every aspect of prac­ti­cal skills pro­vided at higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions: auto­mo­tive core stu­dents use Mitchell 1® OnDe­mand™ to cre­ate esti­mates and look up infor­ma­tion on var­i­ous types of auto­mo­biles; allied health and nurs­ing stu­dents use Med­line­Plus® to locate cur­rent, reli­able infor­ma­tion on top­ics of health and well­ness; psy­chol­ogy stu­dents use search inter­faces to review cur­rent lit­er­a­ture on men­tal health top­ics; and stu­dents find them­selves using these infor­ma­tion strate­gies out in the world with­out real­iz­ing it. Embed­ding infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy into instruc­tion with the same fre­quency as other outcomes-based assess­ments pro­motes an emerg­ing pop­u­la­tion capa­ble of work­ing with var­i­ous tech­nolo­gies, as well as an apti­tude for find­ing the right infor­ma­tion to meet a need in a timely and effi­cient man­ner. There is an every­day use for infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy that would be lost if it were to dis­ap­pear into or merge with crit­i­cal think­ing and obscure its impor­tance by call­ing it any­thing other than infor­ma­tion literacy.

A very spe­cial thank you to Emily Ford, Edward Sar­gent, Cheyenne Roduin, and Merinda Kaye Hens­ley for their invalu­able insight and sug­ges­tions for this post.

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[[2]] McK­endree Uni­ver­sity. “Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Rubric.” Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Rubric, n.d . http://​www​.mck​endree​.edu/​a​c​a​d​e​m​i​c​s​/​I​n​f​o​r​m​a​t​i​o​n​_​L​i​t​e​r​a​c​y​_​R​u​b​r​i​c​.​a​spx.
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[[4]] Fero, Laura J., Cather­ine M. Wits­berger, Susan W. Wesmiller, Thomas G. Zullo, and Leslie A. Hoff­man. 2009. Crit­i­cal think­ing abil­ity of new grad­u­ate and expe­ri­enced nurses. Jour­nal of Advanced Nurs­ing 65, no. 1 (Jan­u­ary): 139 – 148, p. 140. doi:10.1111/j.1365 – 2648.2008.04834.x.
[[5]] Ibid., p. 141.
[[6]] Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­sity. “WSU’s Crit­i­cal and Inte­gra­tive Think­ing Rubric.” Crit­i­cal and Inte­gra­tive Think­ing Rubric, 2006. https://​my​.wsu​.edu/​p​o​r​t​a​l​/​p​a​g​e​?​_​p​a​g​e​i​d​=​1​7​7​,​2​7​6​5​7​8​&​a​m​p​;​_​d​a​d​=​p​o​r​t​a​l​&​a​m​p​;​_​s​c​h​e​m​a​=​P​O​R​TAL.
[[7]] Col­lier, Ellie. 2009. In Praise of the Inter­net: Shift­ing Focus and Engag­ing Crit­i­cal Think­ing Skills. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Jan­u­ary 7. http://​inthe​li​brary​with​the​lead​pipe​.org/​2​0​0​9​/​i​n​-​p​r​a​i​s​e​-​o​f​-​t​h​e​-​i​n​t​e​r​n​e​t​-​s​h​i​f​t​i​n​g​-​f​o​c​u​s​-​a​n​d​-​e​n​g​a​g​i​n​g​-​c​r​i​t​i​c​a​l​-​t​h​i​n​k​i​n​g​-​s​k​i​l​ls/.
[[8]] Zhang, Li. 2007. Pro­mot­ing Crit­i­cal Think­ing, and Infor­ma­tion Instruc­tion in a Bio­chem­istry Course. Issues in Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Librar­i­an­ship 51, no. 2 (Sum­mer). http://​www​.istl​.org/​0​7​-​s​u​m​m​e​r​/​r​e​f​e​r​e​e​d​.​h​tml.
[[9]] Hor­ton, Jr., For­est Woody. “Under­stand­ing Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy: A Primer.” United Nations Edu­ca­tional, Sci­en­tific, and Cul­tural Orga­ni­za­tion (UNESCO), 2007. http://​unes​doc​.unesco​.org/​i​m​a​g​e​s​/​0​0​1​5​/​0​0​1​5​7​0​/​1​5​7​0​2​0​E​.​pdf.
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