LibGuides: Science and Technology Section (STS): Information Literacy: Teaching Materials, Tutorials, and Modules

Teaching Materials, Tutorials, and Modules

Teaching class

Beyond Access. (2013, Apr. 18). Youth Technology Training in South Africa. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/beyondaccessinitiative/8660747201. Used under the Creative Commons License.

STS Information Literacy Committee members selected tutorials that address one or several of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology (SE/T) and a few tutorials that address the more general Information Literacy Framework. Omitted from this list are tutorials where the sole purpose is to demonstrate or instruct in the use of a specific resource—How to Search in PubMed, CINAHL, etc.

Committee members began collecting information literacy tutorials that address the S/ET standards in the fall of 2007, searching the Web generally, as well as the websites of college and university libraries. The list was then updated and refined in the spring of 2015, and a further refresh was begun in 2021. By its nature, this list will remain a work in progress. It is not exhaustive, nor is it intended to be. Our goal is not to create a catalog of all SE/T tutorials, but to find and share useful examples.

Also, these resources are teaching tutorials intended for instructing students, not "how to teach" tutorials intended to instruct instructors. Discovering and collecting tutorials on how to teach is a future project that STS-IL will seek to address in the future.

New Literacies Alliance
The New Literacies Alliance offers information literacy modules for adaptation and reuse. that are mapped to the ACRL Framework.
Roll Tide Research (University of Alabama)
A series of interactive tutorials focusing on information literacy concepts, critical thinking skills, and practical research strategies that maps onto the different phases of the research process.
Online Tutorials (Dalhousie University)
Brief (often under two minutes) instructional videos that cover many topics related to research, including database tutorials.
Anatomy of a Scholarly Article (NC State University)
An animated visualization that describes the different sections of a journal article.
How to Read a Scientific Paper (Purdue University Libraries)
General guide on how to read a scientific paper.
Patents, Trademarks, and Copyright (Univ. of Texas at Austin)
Resources on searching patents from a designated Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC).
Choosing Keywords (Univ. of California Irvine)
Brief tutorials on effective keyword searching.

Biology:

Library Research Skills For Biologists (University of British Columbia)
"We are feeding this tutorial into Blackboard Learn Connect and displaying the content live to students in several courses (e.g. BIOL 140). Please note that any change made here will immediately populate thousands of students' courses. Please consult with Katherine Miller prior to making changes to these tutorial pages. You are very welcome to reuse this content via transclusion or to copy the content."

Engineering:

Technical Standards in Compendex by Margaret Phillips
Margaret Phillips article on using Compendex database to locate standards.

Health science:

Introduction to evidence-based medicine (University of North Carolina)
"Evidence Based Practice (EBP) is the integration of clinical expertise, patient values, and the best research evidence into the decision making process for patient care. Clinical expertise refers to the clinician’s cumulated experience, education and clinical skills. The patient brings to the encounter his or her own personal preferences and unique concerns, expectations, and values. The best research evidence is usually found in clinically relevant research that has been conducted using sound methodology. (Sackett D, 2002)."
Evidence Based Practice Portal (Wichita State University)
Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a way of approaching decision making about clinical issues. It is more than just the EBP research process outlined in the five A's below. It is a means of making decisions

-- with the best and most current knowledge possible from science and from practice (for example, quality improvement or core measures data)
-- as that knowledge is interpreted by a clinician (with that person's expertise, experience, life knowledge and intuition completely integrated into the interpretation)
-- with the collaboration with the patient, where the doctor or nurse values what s/he wants as the outcome for this decision and why.

Patient preferences, as they are called, sometimes change when clinicians explain the science as interpreted through their expertise - we call these informed patient preferences. This enables the best outcome to be achieved for that patient.
EvidenceBased Practice: An Interprofessional Tutorial (University of Minnesota)
Slideshow-based guide to EBP.
Health Research Skills (La Trobe University)
Searching for information in the health sciences

What is AI?

Have you heard the term, “generative AI”? That’s AI that can generate new content, like text, images, video, music, or speech. ChatGPT is an example that generates text, as is Bing Chat and Google Gemini. To generate images, there are models like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion.

Generative AI focuses on generating new data that is similar to the training data. It learns the underlying patterns of the data to create new instances. Basically, an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of the next word (text) or pixel (images).

The other type of AI is “discriminative AI.” That’s AI that can classify, predict, or recognize patterns in existing data. Some examples are Netflix’s recommendations for what to watch next or Gmail’s spam filtering. Concentrates on classifying input data into predefined categories or making predictions directly based on the input. (more traditional advanced analytics).

It’s good to keep these two types in mind when you hear about AI. Is it classifying existing data (like with spam filtering)? or is it generating new content (like with ChatGPT)? These are very different types of systems with different strengths and weaknesses.

AI Tutorials

Empowering Scholars: Using Generative AI for Library Research [presentation and slides] (Hal Loewen & Mê-Linh Lê, University of Manitoba)
Using Generative AI for Library Research [LibGuide] (Hal Loewen & Mê-Linh Lê, University of Manitoba)
AI Literacy in the Age of ChatGPT (LibGuide) University of Arizona Libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
AI Literacy Resource Hackathon [Open Educational Resources] Event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Libraries; OERs contributed by library and education professionals from various institutions.

Citing AI

Authors should check for current guidance from their institutions and publishers on whether the use of generative AI is acceptable and how to acknowledge it. The guidance on how to do so varies by publisher and organization and continues to evolve.

APA
The American Psychological Association (APA) has a blog post with guidance on citing generative AI.
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) currently does not have a recommendation on how to cite generative AI. They recommend using the Chicago Manual of Style (linked below) in cases where they have not offered guidance.
MLA
Guidance and examples from the Modern Language Association (MLA) on how to cite generative AI tools.
The University of Chicago Press
The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A provides guidance on how to cite generative AI tools.

Science and Technology Section (STS): Information Literacy

ACRL Science & Technology Section

Teaching Materials, Tutorials, and Modules

Links to General Science & Technology Information Literacy Resources

ALA/ACRL