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Community of Online Research Assignments

An open access resource for librarians and educators

Science Information Literacy Resources

This collection of science information literacy resources is sponsored by the Science & Technology Section's Information Literacy committee. The Science & Technology Section (STS) is a section of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

This guide is intended to provide a place for librarians to find resources to guide their information literacy instruction for science students and faculty.

Information Literacy Project

This assignment was created for an introductory nutrition course for health related science majors and nonmajors to meet the Information Literacy Flag criteria for the core standards at Loyola Marymount University. The assignment focuses on the evaluation of a primary and secondary source on a specific topic to assess the similarities and differences between the sources of information. The primary goal of the assignment is for a pair of students to select a current popular press article that references a recent scientific journal article.

ACRL IS Information Literacy in the Disciplines

The Information Literacy in the Disciplines site is published by the Instruction Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. It is designed for instructors and librarians who are interested in incorporating information literacy skills into existing curriculum. Resources included on the site fall into two classes of materials:

1)  standards or guidelines from accrediting agencies and professional associations
2)  supplementary materials such as curricula, articles, and presentations

ABLConnect

ABLConnect is an online database of active learning efforts in post-secondary classrooms. It caters to faculty, graduate student teaching assistants, post-doctoral students and anybody else teaching undergraduate, graduate, or professional students across every discipline.  The site provides activities, lessons, and projects along with downloadable materials in a searchable online format.  It also has video tutorials, interviews with instructors, links to valuable technology resources, and academic research summaries to back up various active learning approaches.

Annotated Bibliography / Introduction to Disciplines

This annotated bibliography assignment has five different versions for five different groups of disciplines: arts, humanities, social analysis (social sciences), life and physical sciences, and quantitative reasoning. Each is meant to give students a way to identify and explore the key types of scholarly sources in those disciplinary categories; for example, to understand what is meant by a primary source in each category.

Teaching Commons

The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

Interview a Scholar

Students interview their professor(s) and ask them to describe how they do research, how research gets disseminated in their discipline, etc. Each student can ask one question below. This assignment can be useful as a “first day of class” activity for a First Year Seminar. Novice researchers are introduced to scholarly discourse and discipline-specific approaches to producing knowledge by experts.

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia

This assignment asks students to compare and contrast a Wikipedia article and an article from a subject specific Encyclopedia owned by the library. It asks the students to evaluate each resource by assessing its Relevance, Authority, Date, Accuracy and Rationale. Evaluation using these five criteria is known as the RADAR framework. Although the wikipedia article in this assignment is from biology, it can be switched out for any discipline.

DQP Assignment Library

This resource is funded by The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA). It is a searchable online library of collegiate-level course assignments in a wide variety of academic disciplines that link to one or more proficiencies in the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP). The assignments and commentaries here are works in progress, generously shared by faculty members from a wide range of fields and institutional types committed to advancing and documenting student learning.

 

 

Merlot

MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

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