Integrating Information Literacy Throughout Leadership Education

• In Event: Exploring Effective Leadership Education Pedagogies

Short Description

Leadership education seeks to create organizational leaders and students who are critical information consumers. Through Woodbury University’s pilot information literacy project, a new signature assignment for the Bachelors in Leadership Program was developed, implemented, and assessed. The presenters will share the process and outcomes of the pilot project as well as details of the assignment.

Detailed Abstract

The Need
Because most leaders of organization, businesses, and communities are not likely to conduct empirical research themselves, they rely on information gathered and reported by others; therefore, students of Leadership need to become critical consumers of research through the practice of skills grounded in Information Literacy and critical thinking.
In addition, leaders of nonprofit and government-based organizations often apply for external funding for their programs and services; contract and grant applications for funding typically require applicants to link their programs and services to evidence found in the literature.
Leadership programs may not address the students’ level of skills in information literacy until instructors assign a literature review (“high stakes assignment”) and see the deficiencies. In fact, there is often an underlying disconnect between information literacy instruction and departmental or program instructional content. Program faculty may assume that students know everything about information literacy and so, don’t recognize the need to encourage further growth.
Finally, we want our Leadership graduates to “learn to learn,” because effective leaders are lifelong learners who will continuously seek the knowledge and skills they need to be effective. The Information Literacy Signature Assignment teaches Leadership students how to learn what they need to know and do, and about the sources of their information.
The Framework
How do we address the lack of information literacy skills among our future leaders? We teach small steps in practice (“low stakes assignments”) that scaffold up to a critically analyzed and carefully prepared archival research project (“high stakes assignment”). These steps need to be clearly laid out for our Leadership students; then, those students need to practice the steps throughout the curriculum – not just in research or capstone/thesis courses. By developing a template for the small steps that lead to preparing a literature review, Leadership students can move along a delineated path that is grounded in Information Literacy theory, and reinforced through consistent application across a wide variety of Leadership content related courses. Borrowing the concept of ‘low stakes assignments’ from the writing and composition fields, information literacy research and practice reveals that scaffolding the nuanced and iterative steps of the research process improves the overall quality of later, “high stakes” research projects. Low stakes assignments reduce library anxiety and boost confidence in students’ ability to tackle complex projects. The “low stakes” assignment for Bachelors’ in Leadership students emphasizes the early steps in identifying, obtaining, and reviewing primary sources of information.
The Questions
Will the quality of students’ literature reviews, library research, and critical analysis of scholarly articles improve across the Bachelor’s in Leadership curriculum? Will students report less frustration with the process of presenting their academic research in papers as they matriculate through the program? Will we assess Leadership students’ information literacy at a level commensurate with college graduates? Will our Leadership students graduate with the requisite learning and investigative skills employers are looking for?
The Design
Our overall design will be one-shot, pre-experimental, in which all the students in a course (and eventually the curriculum) are taught the required skills, asked to complete the assignment, and then measured on their performance. In addition, we will compare the pilot Assignment results to the current spring graduates’ information literacy levels, using their capstone projects as a baseline. The spring graduates will not have had practice with the Information Literacy Signature Assignment, but will have had the regular curriculum.
The Visiting Associate Professor and Instruction Librarian collaborated to create a “low stakes” information literacy (and critical thinking) assignment for Bachelor’s in Leadership students who are early in their curriculum. The Information Literacy Signature Assignment provides tools and instructions that, if followed correctly, lead directly to an academic literature review. It begins by listing the relevant information the student must collect from the scholarly journal article to complete an annotated bibliography. The assignment then indicates how the information in the annotated bibliography for the article will be integrated into a review of other articles on the topic. The assignment includes a flow chart, which graphically illustrates how the components in each of the three steps (i.e., information gathering, reference and annotation, integrated review of the literature) flow from start to finish.
The pilot assignment will be implemented in an early upper division course in Organizational Behavior in March 2016. The results of the assignment will be assessed two-fold: First, the program student learning outcome for Information Literacy and Critical Thinking will be assessed; and second, the effectiveness of Integrating Information Literacy Project as a means to infuse information literacy throughout the curriculum will be assessed.
The Results, Conclusions, and Implications
Once implemented, the Information Literacy Signature Assignment(s) will be formatively evaluated for usefulness and usability in the curriculum; this includes instruction clarity, appropriateness of primary sources identified for review by the instructor, and methods of grading and providing valuable feedback to Leadership students.
The Assignment will also be evaluated for its strengths and for areas needing improvement in yielding the appropriate academic level of students’ literature reviews. Once pilot tested, the Bachelor’s in Leadership Program will implement this assignment once every semester (alternate terms) until the students have reached their capstone project. During the curriculum, the assignment will gradually increase in academic rigor. This scaffolding process will allow Leadership faculty to observe students’ progress, and allow faculty to make adjustments to it.
The conclusions we reach regarding the effectiveness of these Information Literacy Signature Assignments for Leadership students can be applied to any program that requires the analysis of scholarly articles; and, importantly, it can be applied to our graduates’ professional development in critically using information throughout their career.

Participants

• Elizabeth Trebow, Woodbury University

• Diane Zwemer, Woodbury University