Current initiatives in research processes
Abstract:
The early visions of an information-literate society have been followed by a number of sets of standards, which state goals and present criteria for measuring outcomes. Yet the primary means for research processes instruction in the academic world remains the single session which focuses more on library instruction than research ability and which falsely assumes that the ability gap in our students requires only a remedial remedy. Other methods, though more rare, include credit courses and programs of instruction through the curriculum. Ultimately, all such methods are inadequate – the one-shot because remedial instruction is not enough, the credit course because it is rare and offers only one opportunity for instruction, and through-the-curriculum because it is so difficult to sustain. The main difficulty with all current approaches is that they are not robust enough to meet the research processes ability needs of our students.
Paul G. Zurkowski, who coined the term “Information Literacy,” wrote this:
Information is not knowledge; it is concepts or ideas which enter a person’s field of perception, are evaluated and assimilated, reinforcing or changing the individual’s concept of reality and/or ability to act. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so information is in the mind of the user. (Zurkowski and National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, 1974, p. 1)
With these words, he opened the door to a new way of understanding our emerging information age. The simple concept of studying information itself as subject matter has turned into the information literacy movement of today.
Zurkowski’s voice was prophetic. Even in 1974, he wrote that people were taking on an increasing variety of information-seeking procedures, resulting in a “multiplicity of access routes and sources” that had arisen to fulfill information needs. Yet, these new routes to information were “poorly understood and vastly underutilized.” He set an agenda for the future by writing: “More and more of the events and artifacts of human existence are being dealt with in information equivalents, requiring retraining of the whole population” (ibid., p. 1).
To make his concept of information clear, Zurkowski wrote:
People trained in the application of information resources to their work can be called information literates. They have learned techniques and skills for utilizing the wide range of research tools as well as primary sources in molding information solutions to their problems. The individuals in the remaining portion of the population, while literate in the sense that they can read and write, do not have a measure for the value of information, do not have an ability to mold information to their needs, and realistically must be called information illiterates. (ibid., p. 6)
From the outset, several concepts were clear in Zurkowski’s work. First, information is not knowledge until it is manipulated or “molded,” as he expressed it. Second, knowing how to handle information so that it can be used effectively to solve problems is the essence of information literacy. Thus information can never be an end in itself but has to be enlisted as a tool to accomplish a purpose.
Bravely, Zurkowski estimated that perhaps one-sixth of the US population comprised information literates. The rest were in the “illiterates” category. Ongoing research since his time has made his estimate plausible, and it continues to be an intelligent guess. Zurkowski himself called for “a major national program to achieve universal information literacy by 1984” (ibid., p. 27), a program that sadly was never implemented by educators and government.
It is easy merely to dismiss the Paul Zurkowskis of this world as visionaries, ahead of their time. Zurkowski, to be sure, was not always able to foresee certain elements of the murky future (though he uncannily predicted the need for a national system for sharing information resources that would achieve the comprehensiveness of libraries without stealing the profits of publishers, and a “pluralism of channels of communication,” thus foreshadowing the World Wide Web). Still, Zurkowski’s vision of the information age has proven largely true – we are inundated by knowledge that needs to be harnessed to achieve goals, yet the skills of most of us, as we have seen, are limited.
Paul Zurkowski is not a librarian but was president of the Information Industry Association, which worked with companies producing information products. His vision of information literacy, however, was taken up primarily by academic librarians. Here the concept faced a challenge it is still trying to overcome – its association with the much older discipline of bibliographic instruction (library instruction).
Libraries, for more than a century, have been doing bibliographic instruction, essentially orienting their patrons to the proper use of tools and procedures for research within libraries. As such, the training has tended to be rather architectural – “Here is the book catalog and this is how to use it, here are the library stacks and notice the call numbers on the books,” etc. To this day, “library instruction” as bibliographic instruction now calls itself, is a mainstay in many academic institutions.
Zurkowski’s vision was much larger. He argued that not all information would be found in libraries but that national “data bases” would be formed to satisfy information needs that libraries could not provide. Zurkowski’s goal was never simply to have a population that could use libraries well. It was to teach people, more or less universally, how to handle information in such a way that what they needed to know could easily be found and then put to profitable use. This larger vision encompasses what we are calling “research processes.”
So, even as we look at the many facets of the information literacy movement that do capture Zukowski’s vision, we need to recognize that there are vestiges of the older notion – that the way to teach people how to handle information is to teach them how to use a library. While using a library well may be one aspect of becoming information-literate, it is not nearly the whole story.
Development of standards among academic librarians
The rise of information literacy standards since the late 1990s helped the fledgling movement to define itself clearly, both for what it is and for what it is not. Standards have, as well, enabled information professionals to set benchmarks for teaching and assessment of specific information literacy skills. At the same time, any standards statement is a bit like a list of skills needed to drive a car (“Brake steadily with no jerking; steer directly with no drift, and so on”). It is only when considered together that the individual skills actually take on any real life. That said, standards can be very helpful.
The Association of College and Research Libraries “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education” (ACRL, 2000) are the best known of many sets of standards around the world. Officially sanctioned by ACRL, they are also endorsed by the American Association for Higher Education and the Council of Independent Colleges.
These standards are based on the information literacy definition promulgated by the American Library Association (ACLR, 1989): “To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” According to the Association of College & Research Libraries, there are five major measures within the standards themselves:
The information-literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
The information-literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
The information-literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.
The information-literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
The information-literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally. (ACLR, 2000)
Each of the standards has its own sets of performance indicators and outcomes, thus giving it a basis for establishing assessment measures and developing rubrics. There is sufficient rigor in the standards to enable educators to determine whether or not a student has achieved the level of information literacy required.
To that set of standards have been added numerous accompanying standards documents, some related to specific subject disciplines (see the list at: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/about/sections/is/webarchive/infolitdisciplines/ildhome.cfm). The Association of American Colleges and Universities (2009) has provided rubrics for any standards that are similar to those of ACRL.
To meet a distinctive vision, the Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework document (Bundy, 2004) adopted the ACRL standards with modifications, notably changing “the information literate student” to “the information literate person” and making a couple of modifications to the standards themselves. Its lineup is:
Standard One: The information-literate person recognises the need for information and determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
Standard Two: The information-literate person finds needed information effectively and efficiently.
Standard Three: The information-literate person critically evaluates information and the information seeking process.
Standard Four: The information-literate person manages information collected or generated.
Standard Five: The information-literate person applies prior and new information to construct new concepts or create new understandings.
Standard Six: The information-literate person uses information with understanding and acknowledges cultural, ethical, economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information.
In 1999, at roughly the same time that the ACRL standards were being developed, the Society of College, National & University Libraries (SCONUL) in Britain, developed what it referred to as the “Seven Headline Skills” or “Seven Pillars” of information literacy. These have since been updated as the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy: Core Model for Higher Education, and include the following:
IDENTIFY – Able to identify a personal need for information.
SCOPE – Can assess current knowledge and identify gaps.
PLAN – Can construct strategies for locating information and data.
GATHER – Can locate and access the information and data they need.
EVALUATE – Can review the research process and compare and evaluate information and data.
MANAGE – Can organise information professionally and ethically.
PRESENT – Can apply the knowledge gained: presenting the results of their research, synthesising new and old information and data to create new knowledge and disseminating it in a variety of ways. (SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy, 2011)
While not as popular worldwide as the ACRL statement, the SCONUL standards have the advantage of more directly following a narrative of actual research processes than does ACRL. As with all such standards, SCONUL does not focus particularly on libraries but upon the stages required for effective informational research. The standards include measures both of understanding and of ability, thus providing a rubric to determine if a student is able to accomplish the research processes desired in higher education.
There are numerous sets of national and regional standards, as well as an increasing number of standards related to pre-university. Together, they encapsulate a good representation of the requirements and measures of research ability, at least in a generic sense. What most of them lack is a disciplinary emphasis, though ACRL has gathered links to various discipline-related standards, many of them are incomplete (ACRL, 2011).
Meanwhile, information literacy has taken on international importance, from President Obama’s declaration of National Information Literacy Awareness Month in October 2009 (Obama, 2009), to international declarations of information literacy goals and principles in Prague and Alexandria (The Prague Declaration, 2003; Garner, 2006). Sturges and Gastinger (2010), based on intimations in several national and international initiatives, have argued that information literacy should be considered a human right. Yet the reality of limited actual instruction in research processes (information literacy) belies the hyperbole found in many position statements.
Remedial instruction
The most common method for providing training in research processes is a single class taught either as a generic orientation or as a subject-specific session, the latter often in conjunction with a student assignment. Most such sessions are library or database orientations only and are generally taught by librarians at the invitation of subject professors. For larger universities, the sheer number of students who must be reached generally precludes much more than one such training venture per student per degree program. The librarians who teach these sessions tend to feel both rushed and stressed, often considering the results in actual student learning to be minimal.
An alternative approach is “point of need” instruction in which students drop into voluntary sessions designed to achieve specific research learning goals. On a more one-to-one basis, librarian reference interviews with students can serve a “point of need” purpose, though the amount of instruction provided depends both on student tolerance of it and amount of time available to the reference librarian.
Technology has provided options for alternate delivery of the content of one-shots. One of these is the short animated tutorial, for which a leading vehicle is the collaborative Animated Tutorials Sharing Project (A.N.T.S., 2011), of which this author is a founding member. See my institution’s own complex of locally created tutorials at http://www.twu.ca/library/flashtutorials.htm (most of these courtesy of my talented colleague, Duncan Dixon). Another technological approach is a quiz-based tutorial program within university courseware that allows students to do actual searches in academic databases in order to answer specific questions based on the results of their work (Badke, 2009b).
The single (or “one-shot”) session, along with online tutorials, has become the industry norm for information literacy despite their inadequacies, primarily because finance, logistics, and academic priorities in many institutions dictate this to be the default approach. Yet the deficiencies of the short-term option are quite apparent.
First, it assumes that learning research processes is a remedial task, that is, something that requires only minimal training. The presumption here is that the student has something of a deficit, but a session or two will fix it. This, as we have already seen, is not the case when such a presumption is put to the test. Learning research processes is a complex task more like learning a new language than learning how to tie your shoelaces. Unfortunately, the very fact that the single session is so predominant creates circular thinking: For logistical and historical reasons, most students get about an hour or so of information literacy instruction during the course of their degrees. Since students are able to graduate with only one-shots behind them, the one-shots must be doing the job, and information literacy must, therefore, be an easily resolved remedial problem.
Second, the one-shot remedial approach assumes that the primary learning challenge is that students do not know how to use the library and/or use databases well. Thus the teaching of research processes tends to get focused down to teaching how to do searches for resources. Like learning how to add an app to a mobile device, learning how to use library tools seems like a simple task. Show them how, give them a test, and they are set. But such thinking fails to take into account the reality that searching using library tools is part of a much larger complex of research processes understandings and skills. Such a process begins with defining a question and ends with assessing and using the resources found to address the problem. Nor does a remedial approach include the reality that, before the research process begins, the student must have a grasp of the nature of the resources that define the literature available.
Third, the one-shot, even when it is done in the context of a subject discipline, does not provide the student with the particular nuances of the research process done within that discipline. To have insider information regarding what is demanded by practitioners of the discipline, what types of information are crucial, how cases and alternatives are argued in the discipline, what constitutes good evidence, and so on, are essential to good research. None of that is remedial but is at the core of education. It cannot be taught within a single session.
The one-shot can be a useful introduction, but it should never be seen as even remotely sufficient to develop significant student understanding and skills in research processes.
Credit-based courses
The seeming Holy Grail of research processes instruction has been the “for credit” course, if, of course, anyone can convince academic administrators to institute one, let alone make it required. The intention of a credit information literacy course is to cover the whole research process from topic selection to the point at which the final research project is written. As such, the intention is laudable in that it overcomes the sense that teaching research processes is a remedial task.
Such courses, however, are rare in comparison with the “one-shot.” When offered as electives, they tend to be poorly attended, because, as we have seen, most students overestimate their research ability and thus do not see such a course as necessary. Truth to tell, those same students generally view such a course offering as potentially uninteresting and probably more difficult than it needs to be.
Compulsory credit courses within university disciplines or as graduation requirements are even rarer. The Primary Research Group (2008), in a study of American and Canadian academic institutions, found that less than 6 percent of them offered required credit information literacy courses. Where they are found, they tend to persist and to achieve their goals, and the fact that they are required appears to be the key to their success.
The problem of needing to respond to disciplinary variability in teaching research processes is compounded by the fact that, for credit information, literacy courses are generally taught by librarians rather than by subject-specific professors. Thus they tend to take on more of a generic flavor, de-emphasizing the nuances of the disciplines. While there are certainly some commonalities in the research processes of various disciplines – problem identification, use of databases, evaluation of resources, and so on – there are also discipline–specific abilities –problem statement formulation, types of databases used in specific subject areas, types of evidence valued and for what reasons, etc.
My essay on the topic (Badke, 2003) somewhat optimistically argued that it was time to get the teaching of research out of the library and into the academy. The academy, in turn, needed to be convinced that a discipline-specific course lodged in each subject major would meet the higher goals of the discipline by training students to understand and use information critically, thus becoming skilled researchers.
The challenge, however, is to justify the creation of a new research processes course, a course that is required as part of the core offerings of the discipline. What is more, such a course would have to be taught within each discipline. For those involved in curriculum creation, the nature of the problem is obvious – curricula do not generally have room for new offerings unless some existing course is removed. To justify a course in research processes as more important than an existing course is a daunting prospect, which is why curricula so seldom change. While I may genuinely believe that research processes courses in history, English literature, sociology and chemistry would revolutionize student ability to partake in disciplinary thinking, I would have to be exceedingly convincing to make the case for dropping an existing course previously deemed essential.
What is more, librarians, who understand the teaching of research processes well, would need to collaborate with subject specialist professors after convincing those professors of the importance of these new courses. It can be done (for example, University of Alberta. Augustana, 2007, 2011), but the statistics show that such courses, especially as full sets of discipline-specific offerings within institutions, are rare.
An emerging, hopeful trend is the development of research and writing courses. The Primary Research Group (2008) study found that up to 25 percent of universities had at least one research and writing course offering. Such courses can, indeed, form a means for discipline-specific professors to work with librarians. There is a tendency, however, for the “research” portion of the course to get rather short shrift in contrast to the writing portion. With limited teaching time for research processes, students may not acquire sufficient understanding and ability to learn to do research with any real sophistication. Still, this is a potentially useful option (see Badke, 2011a, for an example).
Credit-bearing research courses do work when they are given an opportunity. My own twenty plus years of experience with a graduate research course in our seminary division has provided ample evidence that it is possible to teach discipline-specific research processes within a required credit course (Badke, 2010b).
Instruction through the curriculum
Another option is through-the-curriculum research processes instruction. This approach is much closer to our current quest for an optimum model in that it addresses the need for disciplinary emphasis and provides a venue for ongoing skill development. While the single course model just discussed provides only a single in-depth opportunity to learn research processes, the tenets of good pedagogy would argue that complex abilities need to be learned over time in a variety of settings and involve a considerable amount of practical experience. The through-the-curriculum approach answers that need.
If we provide numerous opportunities within a student’s program to learn components of, and improve upon, research processes, we have what appears to be an ideal educational situation. The key to the success of any through-the curriculum venture, however, is careful planning and coordination. There must be significant agreement among academic administrators and faculty members that such an initiative is needed, as well as very careful organization of the ways and means by which it can be carried out. Program goals must be studied and courses identified both to determine venues for each aspect of training and to identify the training purposes to be achieved in each designated course. Professors need to be able and willing to provide the needed educational experience or else specialists need to be brought in.
Therein lies the rub for through-the-curriculum plans to teach research processes. They require a tremendous amount of “buy in” from all concerned, along with the infrastructure to ensure that they succeed in all of their disparate elements. This is particularly true if the initiative comes from administrators rather than from instructors at the grassroots level. Typically, such campus-wide efforts begin with enthusiasm, then founder, unless they are sustained in significant and deliberate ways.
There are numerous examples of successful and also less than successful implementation in the literature. Brown and Nelson (2003), for example, describe a through-the-curriculum program within a medical school. Key to its success was a careful plan, instruction primarily by librarians and some training for faculty members. Also highly relevant was the fact that the medical school curriculum stressed “Informatics,” that is, the acquisition and use of relevant data in order to make informed decisions regarding medical practice. This concept is closely akin to that of “Evidence-Based Medicine.” Thus there was a significant motivation for both faculty and students to be engaged in developing skilled research processes throughout the institution. See also Bent and Stockdale (2009).
One of the best manuals for implementation of throughthe-curriculum programs of research processes development is that of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (2003). Its core concept is as follows:
Information literacy supports pedagogy focused on the development of effective research, critical thinking, and writing or other communication skills. Most faculty can identify these key characteristics in courses they currently are teaching. Instead of creating new courses based on an entirely new concept, the current classes faculty teach can become starting points for creating a more structured information literacy initiative, one in which information literacy strategies are incorporated within courses in the major fields of study. (ibid., p. 5)
The Middle States manual suggests a combination of stand-alone courses and instruction within courses in the curriculum. As a vision, this approach is exemplary and congruent with the suggestions ultimately to be made in this book. Where it is liable to fail is in the sheer amount of motivation and organizational structure needed to sustain it. Administrators have to devote resources to ensure that learning goals are met at the various instruction points designated. Faculty members need both the will and the expertise to carry out the instruction effectively, factors which are not to be assumed, given our earlier conclusion that academia as a whole does not tend to see the information literacy problem as significant.
The essential failure of all such initiatives
The amount of activity devoted to studying and trying to implement research processes education should be encouraging to most devotees of information literacy, but the reality is that much of the literature being produced by the growing information literacy movement is found within the circles of librarians and information professionals, not in the mainstream academic community. While there are scattered instances of universities and even nations or geographical regions adopting information literacy educational criteria and using them to develop programs with measurable outcomes, there are few institutional, let alone national, strategies that are actually succeeding at the level of comprehensive instruction. With all the energy being put into agendas for information literacy, we should surely by now be seeing significant results in student populations. But studies continue to report that most students are not exhibiting research processes knowledge and skills that meet the common standards, such as those of ACRL or SCONUL.
Part of the difficulty is that many initiatives tend to see the teaching of research processes as imparting a series of basic skill sets, with the implication that corresponding training opportunities will make students literate with information. This is overly optimistic when one considers the knowledge base that accompanies true information literacy: What is information (or can we even speak of “information” as a singular entity in our postmodern age)? Where does it come from? Who determines that it is published or that it takes the form that it does? What is the difference between a scholarly journal article and a webpage (or is that even a legitimate question, considering the confluence of formats available for information today)? Why do we have to pay for some information while we do not have to pay for other information? What is metadata, and how can it help us? What are the implications of electronic searching and electronic documents for the way we do research? How do we evaluate what we have found? What are the legal and ethical considerations that will have an impact on what is available to us and what is usable in our context?
It is one thing to create a tutorial or hold a class to teach someone how to search a database. It is quite another to help that same person in depth and/or over time to navigate the troubled waters of the information revolution with such skill that research problems are stated clearly and the right information for the task is effectively and efficiently found, evaluated, and used to optimum advantage within legal and ethical boundaries. Teachers of research processes all too often concentrate on skill sets (Corrall, 2007) while the overarching framework of understanding the nature and proper use of various information sources (the philosophy of information) is simply not taught, though it is clearly delineated in standards like those of ACRL (2000).
Another challenge to teaching research processes in depth comes from the ever-present reality that subject faculty still tend to see information literacy instructors as intruders and thus remain resistant to implementing the instruction they represent, beyond allowing them into the occasional class session for “library instruction.” Information literacy is not generally on the agenda, in any significant way, of the average history or sociology or physics class, even though its students are expected to use the skills of information literacy in course assignments (Hardesty, 1995; Badke, 2005; Bury 2011).
A great deal of what passes for information literacy is still old-style bibliographic instruction in the form of single sessions that major on library use. There are, to be sure, strategic initiatives in university systems such as those of California State University (2007) and The Five Colleges of Ohio (2003), as well as national initiatives like the Big Blue of Britain (The Big Blue) and the Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework (Bundy, 2004). But most universities and university systems lack such comprehensive programs. The statement by Johnston and Webber (2003) that UK universities are characterized by “a limited appreciation of the wider implications of the information society for higher education curricula, teaching and learning,” summarizes the findings of many studies worldwide.
As a result of tentative and abortive efforts to make the teaching of research processes a viable part of higher education, the movement, even as it is growing, is beginning to run out of energy. In 2005, the Canadian Library Association conference included an agenda item entitled, “The Great Debate: Be it Resolved that we Teach them Nothing – Library Instruction Doesn’t Work” (Canadian Library Association, 2005). To be sure, the proponent view failed, and the conference’s business meeting passed a resolution to make information literacy a priority in its advocacy, but the fact that this was even debated at national level shows cause for concern.
The 2006 ACRL President’s Program at the American Theological Library Association convention of June 2006 was a debate on the resolution: “The Emperor Has No Clothes: Be It Resolved That Information Literacy Is a Fad and Waste of Librarians’ Time and Talent” (Downes, 2006). Such a debate in no way proves that information literacy is dead, but it does signal a growing opposition based primarily on the premise that what has been promised in this movement has not been delivered in terms of real advances within universities.
Why, then, given the power of so many initiatives in its favor, is information literacy struggling to find a place in higher education? Librarians might blame subject faculty and academic administrators who refuse to advance the information literacy agenda. Librarians may further feel that those in academia see little need to increase the role of information literacy in the curriculum and rarely understand what the information literacy movement is seeking to accomplish. Front line information literacy instructors could point to the enormous number of single sessions that they teach to a bored and resentful student body. The academy in general could argue that the segregation of information literacy research within publications that only librarians read tends to make the whole movement peripheral.
The following chapters will argue that, while all of these factors may be part of the problem, the real failure of information literacy to this point is that it is simply not robust enough. To invoke the metaphor expressed by Peter Drucker (Harris, 1993), our students should be playing Beethoven with research processes, but instead we get “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” To this challenge we now turn.