IntroductionThe purpose is to illustrate how a team of 3 faculty from different disciplines sought to increase select information literacy outcomes of first year biology students using Bernard J. Lonergan's cognitional theory, the Generalized Empirical Method (GEM). The majority of students entering college have little experience in finding, retrieving, understanding, evaluating, incorporating, and citing scholarly sources in their scientific research papers. One factor may be a lack of library instruction and research experience in high school (Head, 2013;Smith et al., 2013;Douglas & Rabinowitz, 2016). Even for those with prior instruction, transitioning from high school level assignments to college level research can be a formidable challenge (Bent, 2008;Warwick et al., 2009;Varlejs et al., 2014;Loesch, 2017). In addition, few students understand the system of scholarly publishing or the structure of scientific information (Badke, 2012). They do not grasp the relationship between articles, journals, and library databases or the difference between searching a scientific database and using search engines such as Google. In her seminal paper "Desperately Seeking Citations: Uncovering faculty assumptions about the undergraduate research", Leckie (1996) describes how undergraduates have only the vaguest ideas about the research and scholarly publication process; they conceptualize research as "a fuzzy, library-based activity that is required of them to complete their coursework" (p. 202-203). A follow-up report (Rose-Wiles & Hofmann, 2013) suggests that little has changed in almost three decades, and that dependence on databases and on-line articles, rather than searching in physical journals, makes the library-based research process even more confusing for naïve undergraduate students.Science is a research-driven discipline, and therefore students should possess the requisite search skills. They have heard of the scientific method, but seem to associate it solely with completing hands-on experiments or Eureka style discovery rather than with background reading, hypothesis formation and testing and finally communication of results. As Cervetti and Pearson (2012) note, students treat science texts as if they contained established truths, without understanding how facts are determined or thinking of science as way of answering questions. Furthermore, most first year science students do not know how 4 PREPRINT: Enhancing information literacy using Bernard Lonergan's Generalized Empirical Method to generate interesting research questions that would lead to the discovery of new information and contribute to their learning. Even within a science course, the students' laboratory experiences seldom go beyond replicating well-established observations, with minimal dialog when reporting the results.Students often lack an understanding of how a literature search contributes to an in-depth discussion of their laboratory results. Thus to succeed in college, students must transition from replication of data obtained in a highly ...