Building information literacy: A case comparison study

The challenges of writing our own thoughts and of trying to comprehend what others have written are related to one another. The peer review process is based on this interplay between reading and writing. Students participating in the research study were given opportunities to become critical readers of teammates' work and to receive feedback from teammates' critical reading of their own work. Six supplemental online forums broadened eighty undergraduate research methods students' perspectives by obligating them to interact with teammates whose posts were difficult for them to respond to. Because students with different ethnic backgrounds and with high and low scores on a baseline survey assessment were teammates they often did not have comparable research/writing skills or similar perspectives on the social problems they were studying.;A 22 item survey served as a baseline performance based measure at the beginning of the semester and two objective evaluators ranked students' final term papers at the end of the semester. If a student's term paper ranking was higher than her assessment score ranking then she experienced improvement in her information literacy proficiency. Complete data made 14 students eligible for a case comparison analysis. Case studies were carried out to explain why information literacy proficiency for five students improved, did not change for six students and decreased for three students. A number of students' term paper rankings might have been different if they had not plagiarized, had dysfunctional teammates, used a closed list of source articles, had teammates who influenced them to a greater than they should have or used the same article for both forum excerpts.;Four pairs of teammates placed themselves on a knowledge building trajectory by writing critiques that were as helpful and thoughtful as the critiques that they received. In the context of this study when one student influenced a teammate to make a change in her writing they both engaged in knowledge building, seven critique suggested changes were enacted. The information literacy forums enabled a number of students to strengthen their information literacy proficiency without sacrificing any class time and without introducing any new content to the curriculum.