This chapter describes the use of a scoring rubric to encourage students to improve their information literacy skills. It will explain how the students apply the rubric to supply feedback on their peers’ performance in information problem solving (IPS) tasks. Supplying feedback appears to be a promising learning approach in acquiring knowledge about information literacy, not only for the assessed but also for the assessor. The peer assessment approach helps the feedback supplier to construct actively sustainable knowledge about the IPS process. This knowledge surpasses the construction of basic factual knowledge – level 1 of the ‘Revised taxonomy of learning objectives’ (Krathwohl, 2002) – and stimulates the understanding and application of the learning content as well as the more complex cognitive processes of analysis, evaluation and creation. This is the author version of a book published by Elsevier. Dit is de auteursversie van een hoofdstuk dat is gepubliceerd bij Elsevier.
This paper discusses the positioning of higher education in the information or so-called network society. As part of a broader PhD research into media literacy and the success of students in higher education, this theoretical disquisition submits links between information problem-solving skills (IPS-skills), students’ success, social media and the position of student’s assignments and higher education in society. First, I'll explain by using pedagogical theories, that when researching students’ success in higher education in contemporary society, it is important to know why and how students use social media. Secondly, the necessity of IPS-skills is discussed along with the challenges and difficulties. Not only the skills of searching for reliable and useful information are addressed but also the construction of the Internet and the way a part of the Internet works, is discussed, in particular the filter bubble. Thirdly, with the use of the network theory, the role of social media (in the present case: Facebook) in higher education is analysed. Ultimately, this paper complements the pedagogical theory on students’ success in contemporary society. Furthermore, distinguishing education as a distinctive field within the network society will tighten the network theory.
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The main research question in this chapter was: Which information problem solving skills are, according to the lecturers in the Bachelor of ICT, important for their students? Selecting items from a results list and judging the information on actuality, relevance and reliability were regarded as extremely important by most of the interviewed lecturers. All these sub-skills refer to the third criterion of the scoring rubric, the quality of the primary sources. As mentioned before, one of the NSE lecturers holds the opinion that students should improve their behaviour exactly on this point. Another sub-skill that is seen as very important by the interviewees is the analysis of information to be applied in the student’s own knowledge product. This refers to the fifth criterion of the rubric, the creation of new knowledge. The quality of primary sources and the creation of new knowledge criteria both bear extra weights in the grading process with the scoring rubric. A third criterion which also bears extra weight (‘orientation on the topic’) was mentioned as an important subskill by some interviewees but not as explicitly as the other two criterions. One of the facets of information problem solving that need improvement, according to one of the lecturers, is the reflection on the whole process to stimulate the anchoring of this mode of working. In the concept of information problem solving are higher order skills (orientation and question formulation, judging information and creation of new knowledge) distinguished from lower order skills (reference list, in-text citations, the selection of keywords and databases). Considering all results of this research, one can conclude that the importance of the higher order IPS skills – which refer to ‘learning to think’ (Elshout, 1990) – is recognised by most of the interviewed lecturers. The lower order skills are considered less important by most of them.
