Fostering Information Literacy to Create a More Positive Learning Environment

In an ever-evolving digital landscape that includes unsubstantiated claims on social media, sneaky advertising disguised as unbiased resources, and articles with completely fabricated citations authored by AI-powered chatbots, it is more challenging than ever before to filter out misinformation (and disinformation) from the truth. Like all of us, students can be susceptible to this misinformation, which can have devastating consequences.

How, then, can we as educators work to counteract the misinformation our students are continually exposed to and instead cultivate their information literacy and critical thinking? In the past couple years CATL has sponsored several events around this subject, in which instructors have shared their own experiences, challenges, and triumphs, including a panel at the 2021 Common CAHSS conference and a follow-up event at the 2022 IDI. While we encourage you to watch the recording of the panel in its entirety, we wish to recap some of the main takeaways from those discussions that you may find useful for your own teaching.

Using a Proactive Approach to Information Literacy

Preventative solutions are often the simplest and most effective, and that seems to hold true when it comes to teaching information literacy as well. While the follow-up to this post will focus on directly addressing misinformation that students share during class, this first post will outline measures you can take to reduce the occurrence of such incidents by proactively equipping students with the knowledge and skills they need to engage in your content area.

Teach Thoughtful Critical Analysis

Instructors typically spend a lot of time carefully curating the resources that they include in their courses. As subject matter experts, they know what a “good” source in their field looks like and can select ones that come from reputable sources and are substantiated with solid evidence. Students on the other hand may not have had the chance to hone these critical analysis skills and can get easily led astray when sifting through resources. Fortunately, we can help students develop this important life skill by teaching them how to analyze a source’s credibility.

One framework you could try using with your students is the CRAAP test (or the CAARP test, if you prefer), which besides having a funny, easy to remember acronym, asks students to evaluate a source based its currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. Another framework is SOCC (source, observe, contextualize, corroborate) which was developed for history courses but can be applied across disciplines. Frameworks like these help students break down the difficult task of evaluating a resource into smaller steps.

Lateral reading is another excellent strategy to teach students, which is when one conducts external research about the author, publisher, and/or claim to evaluate a source. Often a quick search online can help students identify potentially misleading or outright false information without the need for a more comprehensive analysis. The UWGB Libraries have a plethora of excellent sources on lateral reading and other strategies for evaluating sources, including pre-built lesson ideas. You can even invite a librarian to your class to help conduct a lesson on one of these topics.

Identify Gaps in Students’ Knowledge

Students will likely be walking into your class with varying degrees of background knowledge on the content. In order to help even the playing field, you might want to consider offering students the opportunity to ask questions anonymously, such as in the form of a Canvas survey or a paper “exit ticket.” Once you’ve collected their responses, you can address their concerns in class without identifying the contributors. This helps take the pressure off a student that might be embarrassed to admit their lack of knowledge or misconceptions in front of the whole class.

Another idea is to create an icebreaker activity where students brainstorm common misconceptions about the subject area in small groups. Then, as a class, you can compile their lists and discuss and dispel these myths. Walk through the inquiry process with each misconception—where did this idea come from? Who created it? Why might they have created it? Are there societal or historical contexts that shaped this idea?

In addition to the ideas that students submit, you may wish to do your own inventory of common tropes, myths, stereotypes and misconceptions around the content in your course. If you don’t know the origins of these misconceptions, do a little research so that you can explain their background to students. These types of discussions and activities help students see that challenging their preconceived notions is a natural part of the learning process.

Scaffold Discussions on Complex Topics

Complex issues, such as climate change or structural racism, can be challenging discussion topics due to the substantial number of misconceptions people have. To make things more difficult, students may hold strong opinions on these issues even if their actual understanding of the topic is rather shallow.

To have productive conversations, we first need to teach students the fundamental background knowledge, skills, and frameworks for discussing these topics. Going back to the example of climate change, if students have already had the opportunity to learn about concepts behind climate change, like how matter and energy move through the environment or how humans can influence those movements, they will have an easier time understanding climate change itself once that topic is introduced. Consider ordering the activities in your course to naturally build from foundational concepts towards more complex topics.

Do You Have Other Ideas?

Information literacy is not an easy skill to teach but is so important that we continue to do so in an age when information and misinformation of all kinds is just a Google search away. What are some additional strategies you have used to proactively address common misconceptions or teach information literacy? Or, if you have used any of the methods mentioned here, how did they play out in your own course? Let us know by posting a comment below or by emailing CATL@uwgb.edu. Let’s continue the conversation!

Our special thanks go out to Preston Cherry, Christin DePouw, Lisa Lamson, J P Leary, Brian Merkel, Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier, and Jessica Warwick for their contributions to the 2021 Common CAHSS panel and follow-up 2022 IDI session that served as the inspiration for this article!

Evidence-Based Frameworks and Strategies for Keeping Students Engaged

Keeping students engaged in their learning throughout an entire semester is a challenge that exists across all disciplines and modalities. Though the ways in which you implement strategies for increasing student engagement might vary because of these factors, the good news is that the underlying principles remain the same. Below are some of the key methods and strategies that have emerged as common themes across many studies on the relationships between teaching practices and student engagement.

Foster a Culture of Growth, Trust, and Belonging

Part of a student’s engagement in a course is tied to the affective domain of learning, or a student’s thoughts and feelings about their own learning. Does the student feel like they belong in this learning environment? Are they respected by their peers and the instructor? Do they see their instructor as an ally in the learning journey, or as an adversary?

One aspect of the affective domain is whether an individual has a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. The Center for Learning Experimentation, Application and Research at the University of North Texas has a great list of growth mindset interventions instructors can implement. It is worth noting, however, that research seems to indicate the effectiveness of these interventions is contingent on the instructor’s mindset as well. Studies have shown that instructors with a greater growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset) have smaller racial achievement gaps and inspire more student motivation in their courses.

The affective domain also includes students’ feelings of belonging and trust. While the degree to which you can affect these feelings has limitations, evidence-based practices usually boil down to how you interact with students and facilitate interactions between students. A few examples include using a welcoming tone in your syllabus, modelling inclusive language, and taking the time to get to know your students’ names. Even in asynchronous classes it is important to build trust with your students. For example, you might want to consider using a week-one survey to provide your students with an opportunity to tell you about themselves.

Break Up Lectures & Add Opportunities for Active Learning

When there is a lot of content that needs to be disseminated across the duration of the semester, lectures are a common method for communicating that information quickly and efficiently. But the longer and denser the lecture is, the more instructors risk losing their students along the way due to cognitive load.

One solution is to build pause points into your lectures. Students benefit from structured pauses during lectures as it allows them space to question, process, and reflect on the information that they’ve absorbed. For pre-recorded lectures, the same idea can be achieved by breaking up a long lecture video into multiple short, topical videos (research suggests 6-12 minutes is an ideal length for maintaining student engagement). Fortunately, Kaltura (My Media) makes it very easy to trim and save video clips from right within Canvas.

When adding pauses for students to digest information, it is also beneficial to create opportunities for active learning activities. These activities can be very brief, such as using an anonymous polling tool to check for student understanding during a lecture. For more in-depth active learning, consider making time for small group discussions, written reflections, and other exercises that require students to employ higher order thinking skills. For courses with an asynchronous component, PlayPosit allows instructors to add a variety of engagement activities to pre-recorded lecture videos, while Hypothesis may be useful for incorporating annotation and reflection activities into assigned readings.

Provide Transparency and Support

When a student needs to spend a lot of mental energy figuring out the logistics of how to complete an activity, they have less mental energy left to engage with the course materials themselves. Therefore, transparency and scaffolding are both key elements to designing engaging assignments.

The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT) framework is designed to help instructors write clear and descriptive instructions for learning materials and assignments. For this framework, lay out the task, purpose, and criteria for each learning activity. If a student knows what they are supposed to do, why they are supposed to do it (how it ties to the course learning outcomes), and how they are going to be assessed, they can go into the activity more confident in their ability to engage with it.

It is common for a student to stop engaging with a course if they feel like they don’t have the means or resources to complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. Proper instructional scaffolding can help counter this issue by bridging some of the cognitive gaps and reducing the number of students that fall through the cracks. For example, if the final assignment in your course is an 8-page research paper, consider breaking up the process into several smaller assignments, such as having students submit their topic, bibliography, and outline at various points throughout the semester. Other ways to provide scaffolding this assignment might include modelling (providing examples of papers that meet the outcomes of the assignment), incorporating instructor or peer feedback for the outline or an early draft of the paper, and providing a robust rubric to guide students on how to meet the assignment outcomes.

Additional Resources

Engaging students is a broad topic that we are only just able to scratch the surface of in this post. Below are some resources for further reading if you’d like to dive in deeper.

Questions?

As always, we welcome you to share your ideas for engaging students by dropping a comment below or emailing us at CATL@uwgb.edu. If you’d like to discuss any of these methods or ideas one-on-one, a CATL member would be happy to meet with you for a consultation as well.

Overlapping Evidence-Based Practices Using Growth Mindset, Trauma-Informed, and Inclusive Teaching

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In Spring 2022 we had talks from three nationally recognized speakers on the following topics: inclusive teaching, promoting growth mindset, and trauma-informed education. Here are the descriptions of and links to each talk.

  • Growth Mindset: As Dr. Angie Bauer argued, we promote learning and resilience and reduce equity gaps when instructors and students embrace the idea that abilities can be changed and developed (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).
  • Inclusive Teaching: Dr. Addy’s IDI keynote shared more about inclusive teaching as “being responsive to the diversity our class and designing learning environments that include all of our students” (Addy, 2021).
  • Trauma-Informed Education: Dr. Mays Imad asserted that learning is promoted through class environments characterized by security or predictability, transparent communication, peer support, shared decisions, promoting student strengths, recognizing diversity and identity, and a sense of purpose (Imad, 2020).

Applying all three approaches to your work may seem daunting, but there are common, evidence-based teaching strategies that achieve all at once. We list them below, along with how they “fit” each category and linked resources.

Pre-Semester or Early in the Semester

Use positive, student-centered syllabus language.

Gather info to learn about students & build rapport.

Align learning outcomes with what you teach & assess.

  • Growth mindset: Provides outcomes clearly; students can self-assess growth 
  • Inclusive: Sets transparent goals for all and links assessment to them 
  • Trauma-informed: Promotes security with transparent communication 
  • Tools & ideas:

Discuss growth mindset and its impacts with students.

During the Semester

Publish rubrics in advance and use them for grading.

Use active and problem-based learning.

Collect and respond to exam wrapper or mid-term feedback.

  • Growth mindset: Models growth mindset as you show openness to change. 
  • Inclusive: Respects all student voices and promotes reflection 
  • Trauma-informed: Promotes reflection on strengths and shared decisions 
  • Tools & ideas:

Use multiple methods of assessment.

Late in Semester or Post-Semester

Consider authentic assessments vs. “final exams."

 

Collect and reflect upon student feedback.

Presentation Recording: Teaching with Zoom (Aug. 24, 2021)

Resources from This Presentation

Training & Support

Other

 

Collaborative Learning Assignments

A lot of students shudder at the thought of group assignments, and with good reason. A poorly-designed group assignment can be painful for the students involved and for the instructor. That being said, well-designed and properly scaffolded group activities have numerous positive effects on student learning. In a quality collaborative learning activity, students develop a deeper student understanding of course content as they learn from and teach their peers. Additionally, these activities can foster a sense of community between students and make academic dishonesty much less likely, as the group setting adds a built-in network of accountability. In terms of academic rigor, group assignments don’t necessarily need to be easier than individual exercises, but students shouldn’t be unequally yoked when they work collaboratively. One way to circumvent this issue is to have teams develop a group charter, like this example group charter (Word document) created by Kate Farley (UWGB) in which students decide on their roles and commitments before beginning a project.

UW-Extension has created a helpful guide that provides more detailed suggestions on how to design group activities, which are summarized below:

  1. Provide purpose. Make sure students know why they are doing the project and why it’s important that they work in groups.
  2. Provide support. Make sure students have the tools they need (technological and otherwise) to complete the project.
  3. Set ground rules with clearly defined milestones and timelines. If you allow students to create the ground rules and milestones for their own group, they are more likely to take ownership of the project and ensure the schedule is doable for them.
  4. Provide opportunities for peer and self-evaluation: Evaluation and reflection helps students effectively hold themselves and each other accountable for the results of their collaboration.

If you’re familiar with the concept these features might sound an awful lot like the teaching with transparency framework. If that concept is unfamiliar to you, you can learn more about it here.