Ever since I read Stanley Wilder’s January article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions,” I can’t stop thinking about Wikipedia.1Wilder calls information literacy “the wrong solution to the wrong problem facing librarianship.”2 He says that, “any educational philosophy is doomed to failure if it views students as information seekers in need of information training.”3I think Wilder would find my recent experience illustrative:
Last week, I was looking over a student’s shoulder as he was reading an article on Wikipedia, the open source“people’s encyclopedia.”
“I love Wikipedia!” I said to him.
He looked up at me warily - my reputation precedes me - and asked, ”Uh���why?”
“Because it gives me a chance to talk about reliable sources,” I said.
“Huh?”
Isat down next to him.“Well, let me show you what I mean.What’s your idea about how articles get into Wikipedia?”
“I don’t know,” he offered.“Probably there’s some company that pays a bunch of people to write the stuff.”
I told him that, in fact, anybody can submit entries to Wikipedia, and that any visitor to the site can edit other entries.
“Oh,” he replied, frowning. It was the kind of “Oh” that all library media specialists get from time to time, the one that variously means, “So what?” or, “Are you going to make this harder for me?” or “I really don’t care, so long as I get the information.”
I plowed on, showing him two sources from our online databases, one of similar length to the Wikipedia entry and one that offered much more detailed information, including photos of the subject.
Polite young man that he was, he thanked me profusely for my help. Then he printed the Wikipedia article.
Wilder says, “���librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online.”4The same goes for high school students. “The typical freshman,” Wilder continues, “assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program.”5
Deborah Fallows’ recent Pew study supports this contention.6In a study of 2,200 American adults 18 and over, the study found that the younger they were, the more confident they were of their searching ability.In fact, 97 percent of adults under 30 expressed confidence in their search skills. In spite of this confidence, though, 60 percent of all respondents were unaware of advertisers paying search engines to list their links more prominently, and fewer than 17 percent were able to distinguish between sponsored and unpaid results.
Teens express similar confidence in using the Internet.But then, teenagers have a high degree of confidence in their driving ability, too.They’re also the group that crashes the most often.
I don’t agree with Wilder’s contention that “information literacy assumes that [the student] accepts unquestioningly the information she finds on the Internet, when we know from research that she is a skeptic who filters her results to the best of her ability.”7While I won’t dispute the “best of her ability” claim, what is clear is that for many of our students, the filtering that occurs is just not good enough.
A 2003 Wellesley College study by Panagiotis Metaxas and Leah Graham found that 63 percent of students asked to list Microsoft’s top innovations used only the company’s web site as a source.8On a straightforward reference question, 78 percent of students failed to verify their answers with a second source.These and other examples from their data lead the authors to conclude, “students in this survey placed greater emphasis on the process of finding an answer than on analyzing the actual information.”9
Which brings me back to Wikipedia.Whatever the merits of Wikipedia might be, they come with caveats posted directly on Wikipedia’s site:
Mind you, I spent some time perusing this site before I found the above qualifiers.How many high school students do the same?The answer:those who have learned some information literacy skills along the way - as taught at schools with library media specialists.The plethora of studies in recent years by Keith Lance and others demonstrate conclusively the impact of strong school library programs on student achievement.11
But how does the presence of a library media specialist affect students’ ability to conduct good research?Last year, Cabrillo Community College librarian Topsy Smalleypublished the results of a study of an introductory library skills course in which students from local school districts with library media specialists significantly outperformed students from districts without library media specialists. Smalley writes,
Students from high schools with library media [specialists] are more familiar with basic library use concepts, fundamental ideas about how information is organized and made accessible, and how to use online catalogs to advantage���than are students from high schools without librarians.13
Smalley notes that the quick fixes used to help unprepared students - usually demonstrations or lists of procedures - don’t address the process of information seeking.“The information-literate person,” Smalley says, “has built up layers of knowledge about how information is organized and accessed and is able to devise information research strategies.”14
However, Wilder insists that information literacy is actually “harmful because it encourages librarians to teach ways to deal with the complexity of information retrieval, rather than to try to reduce that complexity.”15This suggests that if we would just quit devoting so much energy to teaching information literacy, we could solve all our information retrieval problems lickety-split. Our challenge, though, is more like redesigning an airplane while it’s still flying.Otherwise, what would be the fate of those student information seekers before we get all the complex problems of information retrieval sorted out?
To answer that question, let me refer once more to my Wikipedia anecdote. After the young man collected his article, I smiled warmly at him. After all, I want him to come back to the library.“Who’s your teacher?” I asked.“Mr. Thompson,” he said, and then left.
I sighed. In the six years I’ve worked as the library media specialist at our school, Mr. Thompson has never brought his classes to the library and has resisted all attempts at collaboration. I knew that as long as that student had Mr. Thompson, his chances at becoming a more sophisticated, responsible and effective researcher depended mainly on his chance encounters with me.
It is not enough for library media specialists to teach information literacy. We must involve classroom teachers in the effort as well.Teachers surveyed at Carmel High School (Ind.) for a study published last year always rated the reliability of their online databases as greater than that of the Internet; yet, “while 78 percent of the faculty ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ refer[ed] their students to the Internet, 30 percent or more ‘never’ refer[ed] students to specific print reference materials, multimedia resources, and electronic databases.”16At a significantly higher rate than other departments, the English teachers advised their students to consult online databases before the Internet and to use print resources before electronic resources. The authors suggested that “this may be due to the strong collaboration of the [library media specialists] with the faculty of that department.”17
Preliminary results of a study I’m conducting with Daniel Fuller, a professor in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University, underscore the crucial role collaboration plays.18Among the 127 students who have responded so far, slightly fewer than 45 percent said that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves were the search tools they found “most useful” for their assignment. Nearly 48 percent said the “most useful” search tools were links off the library web page, the library catalog, or online databases.This result suggests a strong influence of the school’s library program on its visitors to the library.Even more telling are students’ responses when viewed through the lens of collaboration.Among students whose teachers did not collaborate with the library media specialist, 38 percent said they found the links off the library page, the library catalog, online databases, or the library media specialist’s recommendations “most useful.” Among those students whose teacher did collaborate with the library media specialist, that number rose to 73 percent.
No matter how much we push information literacy with individual students, our efforts are minimized without the collaborative support of classroom teachers.When library media specialists and classroom teachers collaborate even informally, questions about searching strategies, evaluation of resources, notetaking, source citation, and other information literacy concepts suddenly find themselves in the lesson plan. When library media specialists and classroom teachers connect formally to plan together, information literacy skills find themselves integrated seamlessly into lessons, reinforced by the classroom teachers and evaluated in rubrics along with course content.
Wilder is right that our profession needs to continue making information retrieval less complex and more user-friendly.At the same time, we need to redouble our efforts to teach the information literacy skills students need to operate in the search environment that exists today. And as my Wikipedia example illustrates, we cannot be successful without the help of classroom teachers.
Which reminds me. I need to call Mr. Thompson. I have an idea for a lesson that I think just might get him into the library���
REFERENCES
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Doug Achterman is the Library Media Specialist at San Benito High School in Hollister, California.He is co-author with David Loertscher of "Increasing Academic Achievement through the Library Media Center: A Guide for Teachers" (San Jose, Calif.: Hi Willow, 2002)