Preparing Twenty-First-Century Ohio Learners for Success: The Role of Information Literacy and Libraries

by Theresa M. Fredericka and Gayle Geitgey

Information literacy now includes multiple literacies, such as digital, visual, and technological, that are crucial for all learners to acquire for success in our information-rich society.
—American Association of School Librarians, Standards for the 21st Century Learner in Action, 2009

In order to be successful in school, college, and the workforce, Ohio’s 21st century students must be equipped with the necessary skills to explore and exploit new information. Students must be able to: identify what information they need to be successful in life and work, know how to find information efficiently, evaluate the quality of information, and use information effectively and ethically. (INFOhio and OhioLINK Special Task Force, 2008)

It is very easy to agree with this statement because we all know that information is exploding exponentially, and new information is being remixed at that same explosive rate. So the guiding question becomes, how do school librarians work with teachers to help our students learn information literacy skills so they can be twenty-first-century global citizens as well as lifelong learners?

What School Librarians Can Contribute

In 2004, the Student Learning Through Ohio School Libraries study revealed that “99.4% of students in grades 3 to 12 believe school libraries and their services help them become better learners. The study also showed that an effective school library, led by a credentialed library media specialist, plays a critical role in facilitating student learning for building knowledge” (Todd, Kuhlthau, & OELMA, 2004).

In order to facilitate student learning for building knowledge, there are three very important teaching-for-learning skills that are characteristic of a school librarian. The school librarian brings to the table the ability to be:

• An instructional partner
• An information specialist
• A teacher

These are three separate roles that are often inseparable in practice.

As twenty-first-century educational strategies are fine-tuned for teaching and learning, school librarians can function as an instructional partner within the school building. They know the curriculum of the school and the resources that are available, are aware of the various teaching styles utilized throughout the building, and are always willing to collaborate with curriculum-area teachers to create an inquiry-based approach for learning. Incorporating the teaching of information literacy skills comes naturally within this arena.

Instructional Partners

In Empowering Learners, AASL (2009a) lists the following as steps in an instructional partnership:

1. The teacher and school librarian collaborate to identify subject goals and objectives to be learned.
2. The teacher and the school librarian collaborate to identify the learning standard indicator that will facilitate learning the content.
3. The teacher and school librarian identify the learning task and formative assessment that will guide the learners.
4. The teacher and the school librarian facilitate activities, such as brainstorming and mapping, to help learners articulate their prior knowledge of the topic.
5. The school librarian collaborates with the classroom teacher to use his or her subject goals and objectives as a guide to choosing the information skills for the lesson or unit. The goals and objectives of the learning standards should grow out of the needs of the learners in the context of the lesson or unit.

As we all know, in the busy day of any teacher, no matter the grade level or subject, there is usually just enough time to plan a lesson—but with the help of the school librarian, collaborative planning can occur. Whether planning by grade level or subject, the librarian should sit in on the planning sessions. Or perhaps “stand in” might be as good a phrase since many times the planning for a collaborative lesson happens in the hallway during period changes or in the lunchroom with just the minimum time for discussion and for deciding who will do which piece of the teaching. If the teachers share their lesson ideas, the media specialist can make collaborative teaching suggestions as well as suggest tools and resources.

As an example, suppose a tenth grade social studies teacher would like to focus on the social studies skills and methods standards with particular interest in evaluating the credibility of sources and analyzing the reliability of the sources for accurate facts. The librarian can address the tenth grade information literacy standard indicator of incorporating an evaluative process to all information sources chosen for a project, say, on civil rights, and apply this to the collaborative lesson about evaluating resources.

First the teaching team would decide on time frames for the lesson as well as methods to ascertain how carefully students judge different resources and how much prior knowledge the students have on civil rights. This type of formative assessment could be conducted by asking students questions about how they evaluate resources and recording through a student response system how much knowledge they currently have. Another method would be to use a KWHL chart that would allow students to tell what they currently know, what they want to learn, how they will find the information, and at the end of the project what they learned. This sort of preassessment of knowledge allows both teacher and librarian to adjust their planning to take into account the students’ prior knowledge or the knowledge the students will need before starting the lesson.

Now, the instructional phase is ready to begin, and while there are a number of tacks to take, in our example the librarian has chosen to teach student groups how to rate a quality resource. One possible scenario would be for the teacher with the help of the librarian to design a web page with links to various websites that might or might not be credible to use for their research. The students would need to evaluate the credibility of each website listed by checking the information discussed with an INFOhio resource to prove the validity of the information. This would help students not only to verify their information, but to realize that databases are checked for accuracy and can serve as reliable resources. At this point, the lesson has been introduced, information has been gathered relating to the amount of knowledge the students have on the subject, and students have practiced deciding which resources are credible resources. As the students begin to search for their own quality resources related to civil rights, the librarian can now put on his or her information specialist hat and help the students with their information search process.

Information Specialists—The Informational Search Process

As an information specialist, the school librarian is promoting the use of the information search process throughout the inquiry-based task. The American Association of School Librarians (2009b) has recently developed four information process standards for the twenty-first-century learner. They are:

1. Inquire, think critically, and gather knowledge;
2. Draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations and create new knowledge;
3. Share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society;
4. Pursue personal and aesthetic growth.

As the teacher and school librarian design the assignment related to evaluating resources for accuracy, the school librarian needs to consider how to teach the skills that cover the standards for the twenty-first-century learner. During this lesson, students will be utilizing the inquiry method to think critically and gather knowledge about the quality of their resources, and they will also draw conclusions when they decide which of their resources provide the most accurate information about their topic.

As the students gain and strengthen their information processing skills, the school librarian works with the students to check for understanding. Each student might be asked to present a selected resource to a peer group so that the group can discuss the quality of the information and agree on the validity of the resource. The school librarian would monitor these presentations as the information specialist and work with the teacher as the instructional partner to complete an evaluation of the process.

School Librarians as Teachers

Using the Resources of INFOhio*

INFOhio provides a wealth of electronic resources that can be used daily to encourage the information-seeking process as well as to demonstrate to students ways to check their facts and find quality resources.

The INFOhio Core Collection of Electronic Resources offers several resources for teachers and school librarians that encourage twenty-first-century skills and help fine-tune the information-seeking process:

• One such tool—World Book Student—serves as a professional development resource for teachers as well as a learning tool for students. World Book Student hosts a How to Do Research program which is linked on the World Book Student home page from Research Tools. The How to Do Research program offers a student section and an educator section. The student section, Research Skills for Students, reminds every student of the steps in the information process incorporating twenty-first-century tools. This nonlinear tool gives students support 24/7. The section for educators, the Educator Research Center, provides a program called Research Skills for Educators. Within Research Skills for Educators there is the 21st Century Educator link as well as a link to the 21st Century Project Case Study Center. The basis of the project case center is to support the teaching of information literacy skills in the twenty-first century.  

• Another INFOhio resource that benefits information literacy skills is the Research Project Calculator. The Research Project Calculator offers students and teachers ways to get help writing an essay or report, creating a PowerPoint presentation, or producing a video. The student just needs to include a starting and due date for the project, and the calculator will help organize the assignment step by step, along with presenting helpful process suggestions. In addition, the Research Project Calculator provides teachers and librarians support materials to supplement the information search process.

• INFOhio has also developed the INFOhio Go Further initiative to help all students in grades 7–12 improve their twenty-first-century learning skills. This program was created to ensure a successful future in a technology-rich work environment and to encourage students to pursue a successful post-secondary education.
  
  

  
  
  

  
  The Go Further website contains general resources to help students with their transition to college or the world of work as well as to help teachers and librarians stay informed about such initiatives as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the LearningExpress Library, which provides practice for tests for college entrance or work-related performance.
  
  To access the LearningExpress Library, every user needs a unique ID. Free and simple to set up, the unique ID allows the user take practice tests and return to the results of that test or return to complete a test at any time.
  
  As you enter the home page, you'll see the groupings of the tests down the left column. You can see that the tests range from those for elementary to those for college students; from computer skills tests to exams for civil servants, nursing, teaching and the Praxis tests; and from U.S. citizenship tests to tests in Spanish languages. An important LearningExpress Library feature is the Job Search and Workplace Skills Learning Center, which helps the user with interviewing skills, resume skills, and job-searching skills. INFOhio will continue to increase the resources for students and teachers for the Go Further initiative.

The Answer to the Guiding Question

At the beginning of this article, we posed the following guiding question: How do school librarians work with teachers to help our students learn information literacy skills so they can be twenty-first-century global citizens as well as lifelong learners? The answer, as stated in Preparing Ohio 21st Century Learners for Success, is found in the collaborative efforts of teachers and school librarians working every day to:

help students learn to navigate our twenty-first-century global environment with an essential set of skills to formulate new knowledge, to hone critical thinking skills, and to make decisions that will affect future generations. Working together school librarians and teachers can ensure that students will receive the essential instructional guidance and resources necessary to develop the information literacy skills key to a successful transition from high school to college and into the workforce. (INFOhio and OhioLINK Special Task Force, 2008)

Utilizing the electronic resources of INFOhio, librarians and teachers constitute a formidable team to help students become successful twenty-first-century citizens and lifelong learners. 

References

American Association of School Librarians. (2009a). Empowering learners: Guidelines for school library media programs (pp. 19–24). Chicago: AASL.

American Association of School Librarians. (2009b). Standards for the 21st century learner in action (pp. 11–16). Chicago: AASL.

Go Further Initiative. (2009). INFOhio. Retrieved September 13, 2009, from http://www.infohio.org/PreparingOhioLearners.html.

INFOhio and OhioLINK Special Task Force. (2008). Preparing 21st century Ohio learners for success: The role of information literacy and libraries. Available at http://www.infohio.org/12-13TransitionWhitePaper200809.pdf.

Todd, Ross J., Kuhlthau, Carol C., & Ohio Educational Library Media Association. (2004). Student learning through Ohio school libraries: The Ohio research study. Columbus: OELMA. Available at http://www.oelma.org/OhioResearchStudy.htm.

*INFOhio can be accessed without a login and password from inside any Ohio school, but for at-home access, there is a login and password that can be obtained from your school librarian or by filling out a password request at http://www.infohio.org/ER/unpwrequestform.asp.

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Theresa M. Fredericka is executive director of INFOhio. She has served as a building library media specialist, a district coordinator for learning resources and technology, and at the state level as a consultant for both the Kentucky and Ohio Departments of Education. She is a past president of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association and is active at the national level with the American Association of School Librarians.

Gayle Geitgey is the director of technology and library services for Urbana City Schools. She is a past president of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association, a liaison for the INFOhio Users Council, a conference presenter, and an adjunct instructor on information literacy skills and student learning.

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