Our FYW information literacy curriculum is centered around the idea of encouraging our students' natural tendencies to embrace a growth mindset. Students with a growth mindset believe that their abilities can be developed through hard work and dedication. They tend to view challenges as opportunities to learn and grow and are more likely to persist in the face of difficulty. They persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as a path to mastery, learn from feedback, and see inspiration in others’ success. For more information about growth mindsets, see Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
We encourage a growth mindset through a series of preparatory group discussion questions; linking the current work of library research to previous course assignments, like a rhetorical analysis assignment; and failing together with our students as we work towards "the best" search strategy in library databases.
Our instructors use a common teaching outline to deliver instruction based on the first level of our scaffolded library instruction outcomes, but we will adjust our student learning outcomes and class outline to meet the needs of your classes. We have or can create outlines designed to teach students how to:
If you would like us to concentrate our outcomes on any particular area of information literacy, please include this in your instruction request.