Information Literacy and the Undergraduate Research Methods Curriculum

The "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education'' generated by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL 2000) provides a plausible set of pedagogical goals to guide the construction and implementation of an undergraduate research methods course. We argue that the context of the undergraduate methods course with its emphasis on developing analytical and data management skills as well as exposure to concepts such as validity, reliability, measurement, and bias should be particularly fertile ground for the development of ACRL targeted competencies. Our paper outlines the five information literacy standards (as well as the performance indicators and outcomes associated with each) described in the ACRL paper noting how they relate to designing student assignments and research projects. It then describes a limited natural experiment conducted using two sections of a methods course and two sections of a non-methods political science course. For one course in each of these pairs of courses, the assignments and some additional course content were varied to reflect the information literacy standards (other course elements including text, instructor, and most lecture content were constant). Student scores on a standardized information literacy test indicate that information literacy-oriented courses can improve student performance on standardized competency tests. However, this improvement was equally present in both methods and non-methods courses.