Teaching for Information Literacy

Reading, Listening, Talking, Viewing: Getting the Big Picture

Obtaining background information is a stage that is often neglected in the research process. Students have a great deal of difficulty formulating a solid research question without sufficient knowledge about a topic. This stage of the inquiry process encourages students to become experts on their topic by reading, viewing, listening and talking to people about their topic. Allowing and encouraging sufficient time in this stage of the research process will enable students to narrow and focus on one particular aspect of their topic.

The activities in this stage of the process include collecting resources, examining bibliographies, creating working bibliographies that can be referred to later and reading, viewing, listening and talking to obtain a general overview of the topic. At this time the researcher is looking for key words, dates, people and events that will allow for other connections within the research. Student should read, look for major features and aspects of their topic and write them down.

Students can begin to get an overview of their topic by using general sources such as their textbooks and encyclopedias.

As students become more knowledgeable about their topics they will find it is easier to be focused and to generate good questions that will allow them to delve into further, meaningful research.

Documenting, Organizing and categorizing information:

During this time students should be keeping track of the resources that they have found. There are excellent online citation tools that allow them to document all bibliographic data as they go along and social bookmarking tools are an excellent way to collect, organize, evaluate and share web sites as they are found.

Students can use a social bookmarking tool such as delicious to collect, annotate and save resources that they find on the web on even on the online databases. These bookmarks can be accessed from any computer, from home or school.