This was a library "warm-up" activity and discussion for a traditional one-shot library instruction session for upper-division environmental science and health & human science students. It was a 75 minute class (warm-up 20-30 minutes). The students needed to find articles and data for their climate change topics. The professor also asked if I could show them how to locate climate change information that had recently disappeared from several federal government websites.

I gave each student a worksheet with directions. In groups of two, students navigated the websites, shared their thoughts with a partner and answered the worksheet questions in writing. Then we had a class discussion and I collected the worksheets.

This activity can be modified for a communication studies, journalism or English class. Students can analyze the language of the new EPA website and compare it to earlier archived versions via the WayBack Machine. The term "climate change" was erased and replaced by terms like "extreme weather" and "resilience."

I frequently use this activity for first year research classes across a wide variety of disciplines when the faculty member teaching the class has asked me to demo databases. I have also used it with great success in higher-level discipline specific classes including biology and my colleagues have used it with graduate students. This activity works best for classes with a research assignment and when students have received the research assignment and are starting to think about their research topic prior to the IL session. However, I've also had classes where students have not yet received their research assignment and working with a single research question as a whole class works just fine. In that case, I usually have a research question that I've created that we can work with but with discipline specific classes we've also created research questions together at the beginning of class.

Students were asked to write either their preliminary or final research questions on a sheet of paper. Questions were then assessed using the rubric.

Although the activity was developed for students taking two social science majors' research methods courses (SOC 323 and ANTH 305), it could be adapted to any setting that lends itself to in-depth examination of information creation processes, the construction of authority, and the contextual appropriateness of sources.

This assignment was created for a first year composition course in collaboration with the instructor. She wanted to use infographics as a method for teaching multimodal writing, and I wanted a strategy for showing how to read scholarly articles. This activity was conducted on my second visit to class, so students already had instruction on source types and characteristics of scholarly articles. We'd also had a discussion about the concept Scholarship as a Conversation. I spent the class time following the lesson plan as written, and the following class day the students had time in the computer lab with their instructor to create their own infographics. The final essay for the class is an argumentative essay, requiring 5 sources, 2 of which must be scholarly. An infographic summarizing one of the scholarly articles is required as an attachment to the essay.

This lesson took place in a sociology research methods course (created with Mary-Michelle Moore). Students were familiar with basic database searching techniques and were getting ready to do their own literature reviews on a sociology topic of their choosing followed by some assignments using SPSS to analyze existing data sets.

After a quick review on finding peer-reviewed journal articles, the librarian asks students "Where does data come from?" to talk about data sources.
Then students split into small groups to explore an article and its accompanying data set in Google Forms. (We have access to ICPSR so the questions ask students about an article that uses a dataset from ICPSR but FigShare or freely available sources could also be used).
After students complete the Google form the librarian pulls the class back together to discuss the answers.
The librarian also pulls up the codebook, questionnaire, and talks about the ways different researchers approach the same data set to answer their research questions.

Students struggle most with "what makes a data set trustworthy." They tended to focus on external indicators such as it's used in peer-reviewed articles, funders, and who the authors are. We also tried to emphasize the quality of the data itself as an indicator (completeness, sample size, questions asked, documentation, etc.).

Then students search for data sets on their research topics as well as other peer-reviewed articles through citation chaining in ICPSR.