Teaching Information Evaluation with the Five Ws: An Elementary Method, an Instructional Scaffold, and the Effect on Student Recall and Application

Undergraduate instruction librarians face the common challenge of addressing a wide variety of information literacy competencies in sessions that follow short, one-shot, guest lecturer formats. Of these competencies, one of the most complicated and time-consuming to teach is the evaluation of information sources. It can also be one of the most difficult competencies for students to effectively learn. (1) In this study, the researchers aimed to find or develop a framework that would efficiently assist students in the acquisition and application of information evaluation skills. The desired framework would be memorable, familiar to students, scalable (used in face-to-face sessions or asynchronous, online instruction), and valuable to course instructors. The following study introduces an information evaluation method based on a well-known framework of inquiry--the "Five Ws," or who, what, when, where, why, and how. Researchers modified the Five Ws to create a formative assessment that introduced evaluation skills to students and piloted it in fall 2011 during one-shot library instruction sessions for English composition classes. Full implementation followed in fall 2012. In both the pilot and formal study, a summative assessment was sent to students an average of three weeks after the library session to assess recall and application of the evaluation method. Composition instructors were also surveyed to assess their responses to the Five Ws evaluation method and determine whether they had added, or would consider adding, the method to their own instruction. The findings of these assessments may be relevant to instruction librarians and composition instructors, as well as those interested in the connections between information literacy competencies and student learning outcomes in general education. LITERATURE REVIEW In 2000, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published the "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education." (2) Intended to facilitate the development of lifelong learners, the standards outline the skills needed for students to identify an information need and then locate, evaluate, and utilize resources to fulfill that need. (3) For more than a decade, the ACRL guidelines have directed the library profession's approach to instruction, shaping the ways that librarians conceptualize, design, provide, and assess library instruction. Corresponding to the widespread adoption of these standards, there has been an increase in research investigating students' skills (or lack thereof) in critical thinking, and more specifically, information evaluation. The majority of these research studies, however, are based on the evaluation of web and print sources as separate materials. As the numbers of online and open access publications increase and the boundaries between formats of information recede, the depiction of print and electronic resources as existing in distinct and separate categories does not accurately reflect the modern search experience. (4) It is also misleading to students who are used to accessing a variety of media and information sources in multiple formats. Student confusion about the format and quality of information sources is substantiated by recent research. In a 2009 report for the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Council (JISC) researchers identified a dissonance between college and university students' expectations of published research and the realities of those bodies of work. (5) When asked what types of information a student would recognize as "research," an overwhelming majority (97 percent) identified traditional formats such as books and articles. When confronted with less well-known formats, such as posters or dissertations, the number of students willing to identify the documents as "research" greatly decreased. (6) Additional qualitative results describing student confusion were obtained in small focus group sessions. …