Information for Faculty

Information Literacy (IL) refers to the ability to recognize a need for information and to find, analyze, and synthesize related material from books, articles, websites and more.
 

How Can IL Benefit Students?
A 2017 survey of 42,000 students in more than 1,700 courses at 12 major research universities showed that:

• Retention rates were higher for students whose courses included IL instruction.
• Students whose courses included IL instruction reported higher average first-year GPAs than those whose courses did not.
• Students who took IL instruction successfully completed 1.8 more credit hours per year than students who did not.

How Can IL Benefit Faculty?

Students who are information literate are better able to come up with workable topics for their papers, research those topics iindependently, and write papers that conform to rigorous academic standards.

Critical thinking is that mode of thinking — about any subject, content, or problem — in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it.

An ability to think critically is essential to a student's time in school and is a vital life-long skill.

Employers highly value critical thinking skills too, with a 2013 AAC&U study showing that “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major."

It's not easy to teach students to adopt a new thinking style; in today's polarized environment, it can even be difficult to impart to them the importance of deliberate and critical thinking.

The source of the above definition of critical thinking comes from The Foundation for Critical Thinking, https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766.

Below you can find links to preview and descriptions of the videos, tutorials, and quizzes that are part of the MCC Library's Credo Instruct for Information Literacy subscription.

Links to the material in Credo Instruct can be added to Brightspace in 2 ways:

1. Direct Links out to Credo Instruct - use this list to copy and paste direct links

2. Embedded content within Brightspace - contact kcook@mclennan.edu for help with embedding Credo Instruct content or follow the instructions at: https://mclennan.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=50339081.