This low-stakes, in-class assignment is designed to help first-year seminar students learn about important library resources and present their findings to their fellow students. In teams, students complete a series of authentic research tasks (called challenges) such as selecting and citing images from our digital collection and using our discovery tool to find books on the library shelves. Each team is also assigned a unique challenge to learn more about the library.

The Business Task Cards is a 1-hour team-based activity. The activity was created for a business management course that needed to complete a business opportunity project. The activity requires students to complete four tasks: 1) Find company information, 2) Find a company's income statement, 3) Find articles on a company's management strategy, and 4) Find current industry trends that will impact the company. A print and online version of the activity is provided.

In this assignment, students are given a range of newspaper article about science topics and work in pairs to find the original research article that the newspaper article is based on in the library databases. Students then assess when they might use an original research article vs when they might use a well-written newspaper article. After the activity, the librarian gave short lecture about online fact checking based on Mike Caulfield's excellent fast and frugal fact checking strategies. If time allows, students can do some of the activities that Caulfield lists in his textbook.

A one-shot or seminar class on fake news tied to source evaluation. Examination of the factors at play in the creation of misinformation; insight into how to select sources; tools and strategies for evalutating content of stories, authors, and news outlets.

As part of the research process, students need to learn how to organize and synthesize their sources. This short lecture, followed by a matrix outline given to every student, gives students the opportunity to focus their research question even more and to add their own ideas to the conversation of research within their chosen topic.

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.

A two part instruction session that uses the "fish bowl" method, or students as instructors, to find scholarly sources and complete an annotated bibliography citation.