UCLA College Library Information Literacy Instruction for UCLA Classes

In-Class Information Literacy/Critical Thinking Ideas

Are your students information literate? Do they know how to identify, locate, evaluate and use information effectively? College Library librarians are eager to help strengthen your students' Information Literacy (IL)/critical thinking skills by teaching these skills to classes which have an IL- or information-research-related assignment. We would also be happy to work with you to customize any of these or to develop other in-class or out-of-class IL/critical thinking instruction for your courses.

Following are examples of what your students can learn in these sessions:

Stages of the Library Research Process (5 minutes)

Describes anxious feelings most students experience during the information research process.

Flow of Information (10-15 minutes)

How coverage of a topic progresses over time from newspaper articles to magazine articles, journal analysis, full-length books, and in some cases, encyclopedia entries.

Research Topic Selection (15 minutes)

Models how to narrow or broaden a topic and come up with a research inquiry statement, followed by a small group exercise where students follow the same process.

Turn Your Topic into an Effective Search Statement for Searching Computerized Resources (10-15 minutes)

What are the important elements of a topic? How can they be translated into an effective search statement for computerized resources? Active learning exercise to identify the key terms and synonyms of a topic statement, learn about Boolean operators, and develop a search statement that reflects the critical elements of a topic.

*How to Identify & Locate Useful Books (25 minutes)

How to use ORION2's & California Digital Library's (CDL) databases to identify and locate books in the UCLA libraries. How to evaluate search results. *(Recommended for English 2 & English 3 classes.)

*How to Identify & Locate Useful Articles (25 minutes)

How to select and use article index databases to identify and locate periodical articles, and how to evaluate search results. (May be tailored to the most appropriate index for your class). How to locate periodicals (magazines and journals) at UCLA libraries. *(Recommended for English 2 & English 3 classes.)

Critical Thinking About Web Sites (15-30 minutes)

How to screen web sites for accuracy, currency, reliability, authority, and bias using web exercises: "Hoax? Scholarly Research? Personal Opinion? You Decide!"

Distinguishing Among Different Types of Information: Magazines vs. Journals (15 minutes)

What are the differences between magazines and journals? Which are appropriate for what sorts of research?
(See Selecting the Right Source)

Unreviewed Web Pages/Sites vs. Reviewed Web Pages/Sites for Research (20-30 minutes)

What sort of information is available on the web and how can you tell which would be most useful for research?

Web Search Tools vs. Licensed & Unlicensed Databases (20-30 minutes)

What is the difference between general web search tools like Yahoo or Google and licensed, as well as freely available databases?

Design your own(with a librarian)

Collaborate with a librarian to create an IL instruction module or web-based IL exercise, bibliography, or other tool, to support your course goals.

(* required info) *Instructor's name:
*Email:
*Course title & number: