Strengthening connections between information literacy, general education, and assessment efforts

Library Trends, Fall, 2002 by Ilene F. Rockman

The goals of many restructured general education programs reaffirmed learning at the center of the educational enterprise, with a renewed focus on quality and coherence in curricular offerings (Ratcliff, 1997). In addition, as the enabler for continuous learning in a technologically rich and globally diverse society, information literacy has been viewed by some universities as the foundation piece of this restructuring effort. As noted by Patricia Breivik in a 2000 keynote address to the International Lifelong Learning Conference, "Within today's information society, the most important learning outcome for all students is their being able to function as independent lifelong learners. The essential enabler to reaching that goal is information literacy" (p. 1).

Jacobson and Mark (2000) note that, while some institutions choose to include information literacy as part of the lower-division general education curriculum, others have made it a central component of a first-year experience program. At James Madison University, a competency-based general education curriculum strives to make every student accountable for learning specific objectives, such as formulating and conducting effective search strategies and evaluating information policies in terms of accuracy, authority, bias, and relevance (Cameron & Feind, 2001). In addition, students are required to pass an Information Seeking Skills Test (ISST) before the end of the freshman year.

At California State University, Hayward, a large urban university with a majority of upper-division transfer students, information literacy is part of both the first-year experience and the general education program on the campus. This institution recognizes the value of weaving information literacy into the lower division general education program via a one-unit credit course targeted to all freshmen, "Fundamentals of Information Literacy," and as part of the upper-division information literacy general education experience for junior-level transfer students.

At San Jose State University, another campus in the California State University system, information literacy is targeted to lower-division students through their English composition classes (English 1B) with instruction also occurring in the upper division (Reynolds, 1989, p. 83). In Spring 2002, the library began testing a new model for English 1B (Reynolds, 2002) using an adapted version of the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) to increase the effectiveness of the information competence instruction and engage students more fully in the learning process.

Support for Changing Curricula

Support for a changing university curriculum that includes information literacy has also come from a variety of external stakeholders, including the business community. Anthony Comper, president of the Bank of Montreal, told the 1999 graduating class at the University of Toronto that information literacy is essential to success in the next millennium:

   whatever else you bring to the 21st century workplace, however great your
   technical skills and however attractive your attitude and however deep your
   commitment to excellence, the bottom line is that to be successful, you
   need to acquire a high level of information literacy. What we need in the
   knowledge industries are people who know how to absorb and analyze and
   integrate and create and effectively convey information--and who know how
   to use information to bring real value to everything they undertake.