Thursday, November 12, 2009

Information Literacy vs Calculus/Intermittent vs Continuous

Students in the science and engineering curriculum must successfully complete calculus in their freshman year since it is a prerequisite for so many other courses. Is it necessary to re-teach calculus in succeeding courses? Of course not. Students continously use what they learned in calculus in subsequent courses.

The situation for information literacy is different. At NJIT we have provided basic information literacy training in the Research Roadmaps given in Humanities 101 and 102. Students immediately apply what they learned since they must write papers using library databases. Not all courses later in the science/engineering curriculum require students to write papers using peer reviewed literature. Thus information literacy skills are used intermitently and may be forgotten later on. Perhaps notes used in our Research Roadmaps should be made available to advanced students who must write papers.

This entry was originally written in the NJIT Library's Information Literacy Blog at https://blogs.njit.edu/infolit/ . I certainly invited any NJIT faculty or other librarians to go to that site and make comments.

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