This sample activity corresponds to a chapter in the upcoming (2022) ACRL title: Teaching Critical Reading Skills: Strategies for Academic Librarians.

This sample activity corresponds to a chapter in the upcoming (2022) ACRL title: Teaching Critical Reading Skills: Strategies for Academic Librarians.

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. While there are numerous guides and examples that show students the format of an annotation, there are very few that connect annotations to research questions or guide students through making those connections. This lesson plan Uses Joseph Bizup’s BEAM Method from the realm of rhetoric studies to help students think about how sources are used and adds an additional layer of support. This support bridges the gap between a student recognizing a source is generally related to their topic, and thinking critically about how that source is used to answer a research question. 

Bizup, Joseph. "BEAM: A rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing." Rhetoric Review 27, no. 1 (2008): 72-86.

A toolkit with various instructional materials to teach media and news literacy. Includes an online activity "Fairness and Blanace" where students watch a short video on journalistic standards and answer discussion questions. Then, students can take one or both interactive tutorials on "Lateral Reading" with a focus on fact-checking and/or "Evaluating Information" based on an information need. Also includes a video on the "Anatomy of a News Website" with reflective questions and in-class assignment ideas for librarians or instructors.

Created by Tessa Withorn, Carolyn Caffrey Gardner, Aric Haas, and Amalia Casteneda.

This assignment was created to help undergraduate students use research articles to help inform their argument about a "text."  This exercise has been used in library instruction sessions for art history, composition, english literature, women's studies, and history classes. After reflecting on what they know about a text (or image or multimedia), brainstorming search terms, and tracking relevant patterns in search results, students can synthesize information from a variety of sources in an organized, methodological fashion. 

This is session 1 of 3 sessions that I do for Introduction to Evidence Based Medicine in Pharmacy. For this session I had about an hour so the majority of the session is group work. Included are the materials to build the activity, an overview of the lesson (since so much was group work, I wouldn't call it a lesson plan), and the rubric for assessing /grading the activity. This was designed for Zoom/online synchronous teaching. A guide was created to assist with the work in the class (with links to all class activities) and be a place for students to refer back to later. Some content in this guide was hidden until they completed their work for each session (since to help with metacognition the examples on the guide are the same as what they worked through in the sessions).

How can we facilitate first-year student engagement with critical Framework concepts, especially in a one-shot class? This active learning activity is designed to teach source evaluation in a 50-minute class. The activity, which incorporates elements of problem-based learning and uses a flipped classroom approach, was added to our institution’s first-year experience course. Prompting students to consider a local issue, the activity requires students to evaluate sources represented as “source cards,” choose sources they would use in the context of the assignment, and justify their decisions. Motivated by the challenge and relevance of the activity, students work cooperatively to consider questions at the heart of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. 

This workshop introduces zines to a First Year Women's and Gender Studies class including what they are, general history and culture in the United States, and the process of making zines. This workshop supported a class assignment where students make zines featuring class readings and a reflective essay including original creative works. In the sessions, students recieve "handout" zines for note-taking and reflective work, a short lecture on zines, and work with databases to find pieces for their zine topics or ideas. The instructor can find example zines for the interactive exercise on Internet Archive and other collections.

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

This class outline is based on the Four Moves and a Habit from Mike Caufield's Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers.
It was designed for a first year writing class for students in an interdisciplinary STEM major. For their main class assignment, they were investigating a "fact" within their chosen scientific field, and tracing it to its origin. In addition to our in-class work they were also assigned to read:

Rekdal, O. B. (2014). Academic urban legends. Social Studies of Science, 44(4), 638–654. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714535679

The class was designed to take 70 minutes, with approximately 72 students attending. The attached PDF gives an outline for the lesson, with notes for further context.