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Information Literacy Flag (2013-2022)

Guidelines for Designing Information Literacy Assignments

Learning Outcomes - IL Flag

  • Select information that provides relevant evidence for a topic

  • Find and use scholarly and discipline-specific professional information

  • Differentiate between source types (differences include primary vs. secondary vs. tertiary sources; scholarly vs. popular sources ; professional vs. academic ) recognizing how their use and importance vary with each discipline .

  • Evaluate resources for reliability, validity, accuracy, authority, and bias.

Handout Study

“Major Findings: The PIL Handout Study” (July 2010). How do handouts for research assignments guide, instruct, and support students about completing the research process? This PIL research preview highlights key findings from the PIL Handout Study of 191 handouts from 28 U.S. campuses.

Information Literacy Assignments

Annotated Bibliography: Develop and refine a topic, search for, evaluate, and summarize relevant literature, and cite sources in the proper format.

Scientific Literature Review: Find, evaluate, and properly cite sources necessary for creating a poster appropriate for presenting scientific results.  Examples:  1.Sociology, 2. Political Science

Journal/Blog: Describe the process of looking for scholarly information on an assigned topic: what steps were taken, what worked and didn’t work, and the criteria used to evaluate the information.  Examples: 1.Research Diary 2. Rubric for Reflection (scroll down)

Source Evaluation: Retrieve and compare two sources of information on the same topic. examples:


Web Evaluation: Find a Wikipedia article that has incorrect or poorly documented information and improve it by incorporating and citing scholarly sources.

 

Citation searching: Determine the impact on the field of specific articles or books from the course readings.  How many people have cited the work? Get the articles. Write a review of these articles explaining how the citing scholar used the original work.