Developing Critical Information Literacy in First-Year Engineering Students

This Work-in-Progress Paper for the Innovative Practice Category addresses information literacy among first-year engineering students. The study investigates students enrolled in a common course taken during their first semester that has a project linked to the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges. Over a two-year period, the course coordinator and the engineering librarian teamed up to improve information literacy of the students through the course project. This paper shows that the timing of the librarian's visits to the class, the development of resources to assist the students in their research, and incorporating reference requirements into the rubric directly impacted the way students acquired information about their project. When the above steps were applied, 77% of the teams met the reference requirement. It is also shown through a new but similar project that when the above steps were not applied, students reverted back to the habit of not providing references or only using the internet for their research. Thus, almost no teams (5%) fully met the reference requirement for this case.