The lesson plan template provides a detailed description on engaging students in a peer mind mapping activity that builds on their curiosities and critical thinking along with writing a provisional research question in a social science course. There is consideration for universal design, a library assignment, and reflective practice and writing. The learning outcomes are based on Research as Inquiry and Searching as Strategic Exploration. Attachments include worksheets.

Practical strategies for teaching AI-assisted lit reviews while keeping human analysis and critical thinking central.

This self-guided, active learning exercise for Zotero was originally created for a 1–1.5 hour standalone online workshop. Zotero is a free, open-source tool that helps users collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share references. It is easy enough for students to learn quickly, yet powerful enough to support dissertations, theses, and capstone projects. Zotero also provides a practical way to engage with the conceptual goals of the ACRL Framework, transforming abstract ideas such as “giving credit” and “joining a scholarly conversation” into concrete research practices.

The most powerful wizards have gathered to battle one another.  Only one will win.  Wizards must use reliable sources to research incantations for the battle, or their spells will fizzle.  Truly wise wizards must learn to tell the difference. 

A lesson plan for a 45-minute lower-division Sociology class. The texts used in the plan are Elijah Anderson (1999) Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City and Thomas L. McNulty and Paul E. Bellair (2003), “Explaining Racial and Ethnic Differences in Serious Adolescent Violent Behavior,” which the students were to have read in advance.

Annotated bibliographies have become a popular assignment in college courses and a way to scaffold research papers. Gathering a bibliography before turning in a completed research project allows students to focus on searching strategically and get feedback on the sources they obtained. Annotating that bibliography requires them to think critically about the sources they choose and their relationship to the research at hand.

When writing a research paper, it can be easy to overlook the human side of scholarship – how being cited in a study (or not) can have real, material consequences, and how social structures can systematically exclude certain people from scholarship. This activity and lesson explores these ideas and gives students strategies for making their literature reviews more inclusive.

All told, this lesson takes about 50 minutes to an hour -- 20-30 minutes for the readings and pre-workshop activity, and 30 minutes of discussion. 

An open access MOOC in French to bonify the information literacy skills of university students (with Moodle).

Environmental science students critically analyzed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website and its treatment of climate change during the Trump, Obama, and Bush presidencies. This library “warm-up” activity was designed to raise awareness of data fragility and the long-term accessibility of government websites. As future science professionals, it’s important to think about how this impacts scientists and their work. Students were introduced to several tools including: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, End of Term Archive, and Data Refuge.

During this activity, students work in small groups to explore assigned databases and then share back what they learn in a Google Doc projected at the front of the classroom.

This lesson is intended as a single session within a major’s research methods course. Rather than using a shorter “scholarly vs. non-scholarly” comparison worksheet, this activity asks students to work in groups to systematically examine a scholarly article in depth, identify and evaluate its various components visually and in writing, and then compare it to a non-scholarly article on the same topic. Groups then report back to the entire class.

This activity/assignment was designed for a first year composition course in collaboration with an English/Writing instructor. It could be used in an information literacy credit course, First Year Experience course, or in another discipline-specific context. The purpose of the lesson is to lay the foundation for students to be able to read scholarly work more effectively and critically.