This activity is designed to help students formulate questions for research based on their own observations and perspective in order to encourage curiosity and authentic inquiry.

This activity helps students recognize that they need to use different types of searching language in order to retrieve relevant results and to emphasize that research is an iterative process. Note: Use when students have already formulated a research question and are about to begin searching for information on their topic.

This activity emphasizes why students need to formulate a research question in order to create effective keywords. This activity also helps students recognize that they need to use different types of searching language in order to retrieve relevant results and that research is an iterative process. Note: Use this lesson when students still need to formulate a research question.

According to Project Information Literacy, defining and narrowing a topic is the most difficult step for beginning undergraduate researchers. This concept mapping activity is designed to reinforce the idea that students are creating a paper/project really entails engaging in a scholarly conversation.

This activity asks students to evaluate multiple sources in order to become more critical consumers of information.

*Note: This is a flipped classroom activity. You will need to provide students with four source types that students will evaluate as homework.

Students will create evaluation criteria that they can use to determine the quality of a source.

A faculty toolkit covering the teaching of fake news. Includes an OER textbook, website links to Factcheck.org, Snopes, and Politifact, and a video from the organization Learning for Justice.

A collection of handouts ranging from the information cycle, to CARDIO criteria, to concept mapping.

A slideshow detailing how to set up and use ebrary on your smartphone.

This map identifies IL outcomes that are addressed in core first year courses at Guttman. Last updated 1/2/19.

Use this activity to help students distinguish between information types. To prep, identify three web resources (e.g., a newspaper article, scholarly article, published interview, a blog...). Then navigate students to the links (post them to eportfolio or Blackboard) and ask them to answer the questions on the following handout. Alternatively, assign this handout as a research log and ask students to use it to record citation information for the sources they select for their research.

Use this activity to help student recognize various types (genres) of information and how they may be useful in the research process.

Lesson Plan: Use to help students distinguish between primary and secondary sources so they know how to use them in the appropriate context. "Wheel of sources" game: Created by UCLA librarians, this interactive game helps tests students knowledge about primary and secondary sources. Associated lesson plan is listed above.

This activity, created by librarian Linda Miles at Hostos Community College, asks students to apply critical reading annotation techniques in order to develop a deeper understanding of an academic text.

This lesson assumes a “flipped” classroom scenario. Students do a search activity as homework in order to participate in a class discussion/activity. Use this lesson when you are helping students learn how to distinguish between resources in order to select sources for their research.

Use this activity to help students understand how information is created in order to help them recognize the purpose and process of its creation.

This activity helps students evaluate their own authority on a particular subject so that they can begin to understand how authority is created and effectively evaluate the authority of other sources they encounter. Additional evaluation criteria is also introduced.

This activity helps students recognize scholarship as a type of discourse that is distinguished by a unique set of conventions/modes of behaving. It also reveals they are learning how to participate in this conversation and recognize why citation is an important convention of scholarship.