Bridging Skills and Thresholds: Exploring Instructors’ Definitions of Information Literacy Using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Not quite 20 years ago, Simmons (2005) positioned academic librarians as information literacy discourse mediators between instructors, who are expert researchers within their disciplines, and students, who are typically scholarly and disciplinary novices. This positioning puts librarians in a potentially powerful role in bridging the gap between instructors’ expectations and students’ performance on information literacy-related assignments, such as research assignments. Indeed, previous research provides evidence of this expectations gap. Even though much of academic librarianship was still subscribing to a skills-based conceptualization of information literacy when Simmons (2005) wrote her seminal article, elements of the second-wave constructivist conceptualization of information literacy (Hicks and Lloyd, 2021) are evident in her argument that librarians could and should help students to identify and understand the ways of thinking and knowing that are valued in disciplines and higher education more generally.

Existing research has provided some insight into how instructors perceive or define information literacy, and this research is foundational for considering how academic librarians can serve as discourse mediators. However, most of these studies predate the second-wave shift to a constructivist perspective of information literacy emphasizing “conceptual ideas rather than teaching practices” (Hicks and Lloyd, 2021, p. 569). Because of this shift, the role of academic librarians as discourse mediators might be more relevant now than ever. For example, the ACRL Framework, a second-wave document, is rooted in threshold concept theory, which is the idea that students must cross particular conceptual thresholds to begin understanding the ways of thinking, knowing, and acting with respect to information use and knowledge creation within academic and disciplinary communities.

In this paper, we describe a qualitative study that employs a novel approach to exploring the information literacy perceptions of 51 instructors across a range of disciplines at a research university in the United States. We used Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, which is a commonly used framework for the development of learning outcomes related to the complexity of cognition required to meet instructors’ expectations, to bridge the second-wave abstract conceptualizations of information literacy, such as those found in the Framework, and the practical needs of the classroom that were addressed in first-wave documents like the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. As a result, we have developed a draft model of an information literacy taxonomy that accounts for both foundational information literacy skills and ways of thinking and knowing. We believe that this model has implications for how we approach the development of students’ information literacy with intentionality, in collaboration with instructors, and as we consider our own classroom teaching practices.

References

  • Hicks, A., & Lloyd, A. (2021). Deconstructing information literacy discourse: Peeling back the layers in higher education. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 53(4), 559–571.
  • Simmons, M.H. (2005). Librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: Using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 5(3), 297–311.

Amanda L. Folk, Katie Blocksidge, Jane Hammons, Hanna Primeau
The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

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