Integration of Information and Scientific Literacy: Promoting Literacy in Undergraduates

Abstract

The Association of College and Research Libraries recommends incorporating information literacy (IL) skills across university and college curricula, for the goal of developing information literate graduates. Congruent with this goal, the Departments of Biological Sciences and Information Science developed an integrated IL and scientific literacy (SL) exercise for use in a first-year biology course. Students were provided the opportunity to access, retrieve, analyze, and evaluate primary scientific literature. By the completion of this project, student responses improved concerning knowledge and relevance of IL and SL skills. This project exposes students to IL and SL early in their undergraduate experience, preparing them for future academic advancement.

Linking introductory astronomy students’ basic science knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, sources of information, and information literacy

“…The small population of students who believed that online sources were very reliable have yielded interesting insights into students' misunderstanding of science (e.g., replication or finding information on more than one website) which has been documented among high school students [52]. This provides evidence of a link between information literacy and scientific literacy supporting many instructors' intuition about this connection and other work describing this connection [9,17]. Our findings suggest that students' overall knowledge of science and how science works is more closely related to their ability to judge the reliability of sources of science information than their choice of sources of information.…”

“…However, other work has also shown that (a) introductory astronomy courses are popular among a broad range of students [1,2,21], (b) the number of college science courses has been shown to be a strong predictor of civic scientific literacy, defined as having "(1) a basic vocabulary of scientific terms and constructs; and (2) a general understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry" (p. 273) in U.S. adults [14], and (c) a positive relationship exists between interest and attitudes and individuals' understanding in science [26][27][28]. In addition, there is ongoing interest in building students' scientific literacy comprised of multiple facets, including scientific knowledge and students' ability to locate and use information (information literacy) [9,16,17]. This study of introductory astronomy students investigates all these aspects together: the level of, and interactions between basic science knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, interests; sources of knowledge and ability to judge sources of information to give insights into these students with implications for the context of the introductory astronomy course.…”

“…Information literacy is not only a critical component of lifelong decision making in helping people identify appropriate sources of information and evaluate the quality of information from each source, it is arguably an important part of scientific literacy [9,16,17]. As defined by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, information literacy is "the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively and responsibly use and share that information for the problem at hand" [37].…”

“…To achieve either goal, educators often agree that basic science knowledge is an important foundation to help students gain an understanding of how science is done and how the world works [4,6,8,13,14]. This discussion encompasses K-12 education, college education, and lifelong learning [6,9,10,13,14].…”

“…Increasing students' basic science knowledge and skills to use scientific information to make informed decisions is an ongoing concern for many college instructors and policy makers [3][4][5][6]. Across the education spectrum, educators argue that students should be trained in the ways that science is done [7] (recently reflected in the scientific practices of the Next Generation Science Standards [8]) as well as focus on educating students to be well-informed consumers and citizens who have basic scientific and information literacy [4,6,9]. Although these are not mutually exclusive goals, there is a debate about which is more important, which drives a discussion about focus and resource allocation in science courses [10][11][12].…”