This retrospective, the final publication produced as part of more than a decade of studying college students, presents a summary of the entire body of research, 2008 to 2022, from Project Information Literacy (PIL) on the strategies students use for finding, using, and creating information for college courses, in everyday life, and the workplace while navigating a vast, ever-changing information landscape.

If you haven't noticed yet, the latest issue of College & Research Libraries "turns a critical eye to the one-shot instruction model." The special issue is filled with articles ranging from a meta-analysis (which finds a modest but consistent positive association of one-shot's and student outcomes, especially when the outcomes are skills-based) to a timely…

"Prebunking" videos on common manipulation techniques

Nice companion to the bullshit assignment.

Set of exercises aimed at helping people avoid common cognitive fallacies (e.g. correlation vs. causation).

College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort to teach students lateral reading strategies used by expert fact-checkers to verify online information. Lateral reading requires users to leave the information (website) to find out whether someone has already fact-checked the claim, identify the original source, or learn more about the individuals or organizations making the claim. Instructor-matched sections of a general education civics course implemented the DPI curriculum (N = 136 students) or provided business-as-usual civics instruction (N = 94 students). At posttest, students in DPI sections were more likely to use lateral reading to fact-check and correctly evaluate the trustworthiness of information than controls. Aligning with the DPI’s emphasis on using Wikipedia to investigate sources, students in DPI sections reported greater use of Wikipedia at posttest than controls, but did not differ significantly in their trust of Wikipedia. In DPI sections, students who failed to read laterally at posttest reported higher trust of Wikipedia at pretest than students who read at least one problem laterally. Responsiveness to the curriculum was also linked to numbers of online assignments attempted, but unrelated to pretest media literacy knowledge, use of lateral reading, or self-reported use of lateral reading. Further research is needed to determine whether improvements in lateral reading are maintained over time and to explore other factors that might distinguish students whose skills improved after instruction from non-responders.

The News Alerts of Beaver County has filled the void left by the decline of the local newspaper. That's worked out, sometimes.

I've started a list of tacit knowledge many of us have about information based on experiences that our students haven’t had.