This is a 65-minute workshop designed for 1st year composition students who will be using periodical sources in their research. Students will practice writing contextualizing statements, e.g. describing authors, genres, types of periodicals, for a variety of information sources of the type they will be using in their own research projects.

This lesson was developed for HIS484 (Topics in the History of Gender and
Sexuality/Pride in the time of HIV/AIDS) in the Spring of 2018. The students’ final assignment
culminated in a multimedia or digital research project on a topic of their choosing and heavily
relied on primary source and visual materials. This lesson focuses on how students, as content
curators and analysts, can engage in deeper analysis and contextualization of the sources they
present through their projects. Students collectively analyzed one example from a particular

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.

Made to be an in class activity or a library resource requested by professors for courses. The first page goes with the instruction portion of a class. 'What is a primary source? What is a secondary source? What is a tertiary source?' It takes them through example types of sources, particularly concerned with history courses. The second and third pages require evaluation of a student's primary and secondary sources.

Lesson plan for a 1-hour introductory Communication Studies theory class. Emphasis is on getting students to use the appropriate tool for their information need while considering indicators of authority. Collection of exercises requiring students to do the following: 1) look up background information on a communication theory; 2) chase down further readings; 3) find a scholarly article that applies a communication theory using the ComAbstracts database.

UPDATE: PLEASE USE SIFT & PICK INSTEAD!

In this activity, students will work on maintaining eye contact with their audience while giving an impromptu speech. The goal is to stop (or reduce) students' tendency to look at their visual aid during speech presentations.

This resource and accompanying assignment focuses on evaluating news sources/claims and were used in an online information literacy class.

As part of a larger news evaluation campaign, Sara Davidson Squibb and colleagues (Lindsay Davis, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco and Elizabeth Salmon) created a jigsaw lesson to use with introductory writing courses. Students were asked to evaluate an article’s content, tone, and purpose in a large group before they discussed the article in the context of two other articles on the same topic in a smaller group. After these group discussions, the library instructor revealed the source of each news article and highlighted resources and strategies for learning more about news sources.

Katelyn Burton (kburton@virginiawestern.edu) created the framework for this lesson plan while an Instruction Librarian at Radford University, a jigsaw comparing four different sources. Katelyn and Alyssa Alyssa worked with Dr. Michele Ren's Women's and Gender Studies 200 class at Radford. Dr. Ren asked for something related to global women's issues.