Conference Agenda

In an attempt to economize, study programmes at UiT The Arctic University of Norway are undergoing comprehensive revision. The university board has decided that all discipline-based bachelor's programmes shall include compulsory training in information literacy and academic writing. The University Library at UiT has been tasked with designing this offer.

While we are happy that the University recognizes the importance of information literacy and academic writing, the conditions around which the assignment is given raises issues that need to be addressed, the most important being:

How to reconcile shrinking budgets, limited resources and overworked teaching staff, with the thoughtful, richly contextualized and well-integrated information literacy teaching and learning that we strive for?

With the turn from standards to frames (ACRL, 2015), IL professionals' views of their domain matured with the incorporation of insights gained from construing IL as encompassing a limited set of important threshold concepts (Hofer et al., 2019), and an emphasis on the gradual and potentially transformative nature of information literacy learning (e.g,,Nierenberg et al., 2024). However, in a climate of increasing demand for doing more with less, the tension between ideals and reality is becoming dangerously strained.

In this talk, we present the development of a comprehensive set of flexible teaching materials, to be implemented by bachelors’s programmes from the autumn of 2025. We will go through the background and the slightly special circumstances of the project, the timeline, as well as our philosophy and our working methods.

We will explain the components and integration of the new IL offering. Briefly, it consists of two digital self-study components plus suggestions for synchronous learning and assessment activities that can be adapted to the individual study programme. The training will correspond to approximately 70 student working hours. A somewhat unique feature of our approach is the reliance on non-library teaching staff to adapt and implement the synchronous components, with library staff serving as advisors.

In this project, we’ve been particularly concerned with the tension between the generic and the discipline-specific, between the decreasing resources and the increasing demand, and the tension between the stable, basic aspects of IL and academic writing and trends that are fleeting/changing rapidly (e.g. new technology and tools)

Our hope is that the new model, combining general asynchronous self-study components and discipline-adapted teaching carried out by the study programmes themselves, strikes the right balance between these tensions.

References

Association of College & Research Libraries. (2015). Framework for information literacy for higher education. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework

Hofer, A., Lin Hanick, S., & Townsend, L. (2019). Transforming information literacy instruction: Threshold concepts in theory and practice. Libraries Unlimited.

Nierenberg, E., Solberg, M., Låg, T., & Dahl, T. I. (2024). Knowing, doing, and feeling: A three-year, mixed-methods study of undergraduates’ information literacy development. College & Research Libraries, 85(6). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.85.6.804

A changing information landscape requires educating students on those changes. Artificial intelligence, opaque algorithms, and information sources removed from their original context (for example news on TikTok) all pose challenges (Head, 2018). Evaluating information is a key component of information literacy but students continue to struggle with it (Head, 2010). Without the ability to identify whether a source is credible, reliable, and the best evidence for their information need, students will be unable to succeed in school as well as life outside of school. 

To meet student and faculty needs, the authors are building an asynchronous evaluation tutorial with a Creative Commons License. This approach is responsive to the learning styles of students who thrive off innovative, accessible pedagogical strategies that amplify the content and actively engage them (Lang, 2020). The tutorial combines important evaluation frames such as lateral reading (Caulfield) with graphic elements (comic strips) and interactive assessments that can be embedded into courses or used for independent learning.   

This session will provide an in-depth look at the tutorial’s development process, highlight its interactive features, and offer practical strategies for faculty and student engagement. Attendees will gain concrete insights into designing effective information literacy resources and will receive access to the tutorial for potential adaptation and use in their own institutions. 

 

References 

Caulfield, M. (June 19, 2019). SIFT (The Four Moves), https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/  

Head, A. J., Wihbey, J.,  Metaxas, P. T., MacMillan, M., and Cohen, D. (October 16, 2018). How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians. Project Information Literacy, https://projectinfolit.org/publications/news-study/‎ 

Head, A. J., & Eisenberg, M. B. (November 1, 2010). Truth be told: How college students evaluate and use information in the digital age. Project Information Literacy, https://projectinfolit.org/publications/evaluating-information-study/ 

Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. New York: Basic Books.

Background

The **** Library supports a diverse community of approximately 1,350 members, including doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and faculty in the social sciences from all over Europe. Its Information Literacy Working Group (ILWG), comprising four subject specialists with doctoral training and an Open Science team, provides user-focused support through individual consultations and a calendar of specialised training sessions, a practice commonly described as ‘boutique approach’ (Priestner & Tilley, 2012). The team also addresses data, visual, and digital literacies, as well as scholarly communication.

Objectives

This study aims to assess the evolution and effectiveness of information literacy training at the *** Library over the past decade (2015-2024) using ten years of statistical and qualitative data; to identify key challenges and opportunities in delivering information literacy support; to provide recommendations for improvements.

Methodology

Quantitative data includes ten years of statistics modelled on SCONUL’s ‘Benchmarking Statistics’ (2025), four user satisfaction surveys (2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024), and a needs assessment survey (May 2024). Qualitative data stems from open-ended survey comments, informal feedback, and instructor reflections from ILWG meetings. This study also takes into account a research about *** doctoral students (Signoriello, 2021), which offers a better understanding of their information seeking behaviour.

Findings

Findings reaffirm that the boutique approach to information literacy (Priestner & Tilley, 2012) remains highly effective for the ***’s research community. Several improvements, however, have been and will be implemented in the following areas:

• Enhanced communication to optimise attendance.

• Broader offerings to accommodate smaller and more focused research groups.

• Student-centred teaching approaches (Trigwell & Prosser, 2004) especially aimed at online teaching, with continuous professional development for librarians.

• Development of asynchronous material.

• Collaborations with other institutions and researchers to bridge knowledge gaps and share expertise.

While these developments may initially appear specific to the ***, this study demonstrates that an accurate analysis of statistics can significantly improve the training provided by academic libraries, and it furthermore suggests how improvements can be accomplished.

References

Benchmarking Statistics. (2025). SCONUL | Society of College, National and University Libraries. Retrieved January 29, 2025, from https://www.sconul.ac.uk/services-for-members/benchmarking-statistics/

Priestner, A., & Tilley, E. (2012). Introducing the boutique approach. In A. Priestner & E. Tilley (Eds.), Personalising library services in higher education: The boutique approach. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

Signoriello, F. (2021). Trustworthiness in scholarly communication and information literacy competences in European doctoral students. University of Sheffield. Retrieved January 28, 2025, from https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.14652515

Trigwell, K., & Prosser, M. (2004). Development and use of the approaches to teaching inventory. Educational Psychology Review, 16(4), 409–424.

Like many dental schools in the United States, the dental school in this study has an international dentist program (IDP) which matriculates a small number of international students with dental degrees from countries outside the US, many of whom are practicing dentists with years of experience, through an accelerated and intensive curriculum that allows them to graduate with a US Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) degree in less time than traditional students. One of the biggest challenges of this program is to take numerous students from wildly different educational and other backgrounds and normalize fundamental skills to ensure success in the DDS program. In the first part of the first year of the program, the IDP students are immersed in intensive didactic and clinical coursework and experiences that not only seek to normalize them among one another, but also ensure that they have equivalent skills to advanced DDS students, whose cohort they join in fall of their first year. One of the skills addressed in their early, intensive didactic courses is information literacy including evidence-based practice. This curriculum has undergone several changes and evolved significantly over the seven years it has been deployed. There have been significant changes in its timing, expansions in number of classes and information covered, and how it shares concurrent timing with other modules both as a standalone course as well as under different umbrella courses. This presentation evaluates the changes it has underwent through the lens of longitudinal student self-assessments and other in-class assessments throughout the past seven years.

During the last decade the University of Groningen Library has developed an extensive information literacy programme for all faculties and skill levels of students, from first year to PhD students. The programme consists of lectures, workshops, one-on-one consultation, written assignments and multiple-choice tests. In the last two years we have been incorporating elements of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) research in our teaching materials. This innovation is in line with our strategy of using active learning to increase motivation and match lessons to the true SLR support that we provide at the highest skill levels. These benefits are highly important in an information landscape where thorough information skills and ability to demonstrate how information is retrieved are more important than ever.

We have adapted two steps from our Seven-step search plan. This general information literacy plan provides guidance on how to structure the search process from how to create a research question to properly gathering and processing literature sources. In this session we will describe how we adapted two steps: Search strategy and Processing. For the Search Strategy, we describe how we teach students to create advanced search strings in order to create a more complete and reliable overview of the literature. These advanced search strings can contain elements like truncation, advanced Boolean operator logic and use of field codes. Depending on the skill level of the students, the search examples incorporate multiple or sometimes all of the requirements of SLR research. For the processing step, we have incorporated SLR concepts of creating a literature overview, using a structured search methodology and replicability. Students create a Personal Search Plan (PSP) based on a template that guides them through a systematic approach to literature searching. The PSP is suitable as a homework assignment that can be graded or be used in discussions with peers or supervisors. These adaptations are modular and scalable and are embedded in our educational programme.

The response to our innovations is very positive. Students’ performance on the PSP is excellent in many cases and students regularly outperform the skill requirements of our previous programme by a large margin. We see an increase in requests from teachers for these materials as well as an increase in consultation requests from both master and PhD students. The current materials provide a solid basis for Master and PhD students who are planning to create an official SRL.

We conclude that the adaptations enable the students to learn more, earlier in their academic career and are able to make their learning process and results insightful for themselves and others. In this best practice session, I will demonstrate and share all the key elements and their implementation in order to give a practical template for others to implement and build upon.

Keywords: Systematic Literature Review, SLR, best practices, active learning, educational programme