Mrs. O'Grady, will you help me find some stuff for my Senior Project?"
"Sure," I replied and asked him about the project and what he had found so far.
"Nothing," he said. "I don't know how to use this thing." He pointed to the library computer.
We sat together, and in a few minutes I showed him how to access the online card catalog, the magazine index on CD-ROM, some bookmarked sites on the Internet, and the site for the local public library. Because the student had developed an appropriate essential question, he found enough information at one computer terminal to identify the 25 quality sources that he needed for his project on automobile safety and teen drivers.
"Thanks, Mrs. O'Grady. I never knew the library had so much information."
I smiled and sighed.
Library Innovations
I find it surprising that high school seniors do not have information literacy skills until I remember that online services are recent innovations. The library has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. School librarians, also known as teacher-librarians, are challenged to teach information skills with constantly changing tools. In my six years as a teacher-librarian, I've encountered six magazine indexes from six vendors, learning on the fly with each product change.
In the meantime, high school seniors continue to graduate and must learn the skills necessary to navigate the high-tech libraries in their community and at college. Without appropriate skills, they may not be able to effectively use the Internet from their home computers. High school students need to learn information literacy skills. If they don't, they will have to catch up after high school to keep up with our ever changing information-rich society (American Library Association, 1998).
Information literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, and use information from a variety of sources. With these skills, graduates can think independently, connect their studies to their own lives, and transfer applicable skills from one discipline to another. Information literacy skills are now introduced in elementary school, where students learn to use the online catalog and resources on CD-ROM. Teachers continue to teach these skills across the curriculum and across all levels of instruction. A recent discussion on LM_NET, a listserv for school librarians, dealt with the appropriate age to introduce Boolean searching skills. Some librarians begin instruction with students as young as 3rd grade. Like other skills that schools constantly reinforce, library skills must be revisited in middle and high school.
The Senior Project
The Senior Project, which allows students to self-select a topic, to study it in depth, and to produce a culminating exhibition, is one vehicle for promoting information literacy in the high school. To succeed at their Senior Project, students must use an appropriate research process; formulate their own essential question; seek out and evaluate sources; write about their experiences in a journal; and create, produce, and evaluate the product and the process. No longer are rote memorization and fact regurgitation sufficient to graduate from high school.
Schools across the country are adopting the Senior Project as a culminating exhibition to demonstrate learning. Teachers and administrators continue to refine the assessment process to include the evaluation of information literacy skills. Requiring an annotated bibliography for the Senior Project gives a teacher the opportunity to assess a student's ability to find, evaluate, and use resources. During discussions with the teacher, the student explains why he or she chose to include specific sources and to exclude others.
Teachers may work with the teacher-librarian or become more familiar with library research tools themselves to evaluate whether the student has done satisfactory work. Working cooperatively with the teacher-librarian, whose expertise lies in accessing and evaluating materials, makes sense and spreads the responsibility for teaching to those best equipped to teach and assess information skills. The planning, instruction, and evaluation processes of the Senior Project should include teacher-librarians to ensure that students are successfully learning information skills.
Too often, teachers send students into the school library to do research without properly preparing them and without explaining that research is a process for which models are available. An information-literate learner is, according to Loertscher (1998), a student who can think creatively, think critically, investigate in an organized manner, use information responsibly, and communicate effectively. To help students become organized investigators, teachers and teacher-librarians should use a consistent research model, encouraging the students to learn and use appropriate vocabulary and to think about their own process of research.
Models, naturally, are imperfect examples of a process that is generally not linear, but circular. Thinking may go fast or slow or undergo an about-face during the process. Teachers and teacher-librarians can help students decrease frustration and increase learning by assessing students and leading them through the process at their own level of understanding.
Evaluating Information
Students should receive some instruction on how to recognize quality information (Caruso, 1997). They may not intuitively know about authoritative sources and writers, currency, and fact versus opinion. Knowing how to evaluate resources helps students become critical thinkers.
Teacher-librarians can point students toward prescreened Web sites, giving students the opportunity to compare those sites with others that they have stumbled across while browsing. Students can also check the authority of a writer by reading the introductory remarks on a Web page just as they might read the information on a book jacket. They may need a reminder to watch out for leading vocabulary that may give an unnecessary bias to the information. And certainly students should be aware of the Web site's domain—.edu, .com, .gov—which may shed light on the authority of the information. During formalized Internet instruction, teachers can introduce such tools as the site www.quick.org.uk, which gives Web evaluation tips.
Thinking about the process before beginning a research task is always valuable (Blakey & Spence, 1990); learning about the process in isolation is not worthwhile. An appropriate project should introduce the process; that is, the teacher should introduce the skills when students need them to accomplish a task.
The Senior Project is an excellent tool for ensuring that students have become information literate before they graduate from high school because it requires a final practice in researching in an organized manner, synthesizing material, and presenting it clearly and effectively. At Henry M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek, Washington, a student presents his or her Senior Project to a panel of teachers, parents, and community members who have some knowledge of the subject. A question-and-answer period follows the initial presentation. Students are required to use some form of technology—video, overhead projector, PowerPoint software, audio, or CD-ROM—to demonstrate proficiency in modern presentation tools. Being able to present ideas in an organized fashion and to use technology tools is part of what Loertscher (1998) means by being information literate.
Teachers and teacher-librarians can effectively work together to ensure that students leave high school with information literacy skills. Working together means taking the time to plan cooperatively, communicate, and discuss the best means of instruction. It means using the talents of both the teacher and the teacher-librarian to coordinate lessons, accomplish assessment, and arrange for the use of school facilities. I hope that with consistent lessons and coordinated planning, I will never again hear a high school senior say, "I've never used the online catalog before."
