Research & Information Literacy Hub Guide
Scholarly research—the process of posing problems, designing effective investigative strategies, collecting and evaluating information, drawing conclusions, and presenting findings—drives the creation and dissemination of new knowledge in and across all academic disciplines, professions, and walks of life. Today’s information explosion places a particular requirement on anyone doing research to develop the abilities associated with information literacy—knowing how to locate needed information, assess the accuracy of sources, and use them to good effect. BU’s mission as a research university embraces the conviction that research and information literacy should be central to an undergraduate university education. By learning from BU faculty how new knowledge is created and disseminated, and by conducting or participating in research, BU students join a community of inquiry with a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. Hub Curriculum Guide
Learning Outcomes for Research & Information Literacy
Courses and co-curricular activities in this area must have all outcomes.
- Students will be able to search for, select, and use a range of publicly available and discipline-specific information sources ethically and strategically to address research questions.
- Students will demonstrate understanding of the overall research process and its component parts, and be able to formulate good research questions or hypotheses, gather and analyze information, and critique, interpret, and communicate findings.
If you are proposing a RIL course or if you want to learn more about these outcomes, please see this Interpretive Document. Interpretive Documents, written by the General Education Committee, are designed to answer questions faculty have raised about Hub policies, practices, and learning outcomes as a part of the course approval process. To learn more about the proposal process, start here.
Assignment Ideas
Annotated bibliographies. Students may develop an annotated bibliography as a stand-alone assignment, a part of a research prospectus, or a component of a final research paper or other project. Instruction from BU librarians can focus on the discovery and use of sources, evaluation of information for different purposes, and citation management and formatting.
Rubrics — existing examples or rubrics developed specifically for a course or assignment — can be used to evaluate student bibliographies. Examples of such rubrics include:
Research diary. Students maintain a structured log of the steps and thought processes they undergo as they conduct their research. Keeping a log gives them the opportunity to reflect on the research process as they discover more information about a topic. Diaries are graded using a rubric evaluating the students’ diaries according to several criteria.
Scaffolded assignments combining research instruction from BU librarians with searching activities and reflections on the research process. Students may be instructed on research techniques and sources appropriate to the topic of their course and the genre of their assignment (e.g. research paper, report, oral presentation, multimodal composition). They will be asked to conduct increasingly complex searches through library sources, report on the results of those searches, and reflect on their changing understanding of the research process and of the scholarly conversation around their topic. Instruction can be in class or via flipped classroom videos. (Example from CAS WR150)
Project CORA (Collection of Online Research Assignments)
https://www.projectcora.org/
- An open educational resource (OER) for faculty and librarians intended to be “a collaborative space for adapting and experimenting with research assignments and sharing the success or lessons learned so that others may benefit.”
Course Design Questions
- What process(es) do you use to teach the key elements of research and information literacy in your course?
- What materials do you use to teach research and information literacy specifically?
- Do students have opportunities throughout the semester to apply and practice these skills and receive feedback?
- What graded assignments evaluate how well students can demonstrate their ability to formulate research questions, find and use information sources to address research questions, analyze information, and interpret and communicate the findings? (application and demonstration of mastery)