professionalreviews

2006d

• USING POP CULTURE TO TEACH INFORMATION LITERACY: METHODS TO ENGAGE A NEW GENERATION

  Linda D. Behen

  You view information literacy as a course of instruction that begins with the freshman and ends with the senior. To reach every student, you concentrate on teaching freshmen in their world history classes, sophomores in health classes, juniors through a required major research paper, and seniors through individual classes. You have goals for each grade level and a structured curriculum so that you know what will be covered and mastered at each grade level. You also know that students will be extremely bored when you teach information literacy as a course. But you are creative, fun-loving, and knowledgeable about popular culture. So, you use what kids are interested in and bridge them from one world to another.

      Clever. Not my cup of tea as one who has a totally different philosophy, but this method has some adherents in the field. If your program is a curriculum, then this book provides some lively ideas for conducting a library school for teens. Otherwise, one would best capture students’ attention by starting with what they value—then move them into territory where they will learn what you need them to learn. (Libraries Unlimited, 2006. 128 pp. $35.00. 1-59158-301-2.)

  Bottom line: Pass this one by.

• Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age: How to Locate and Evaluate Information Sources

  Leslie F. Stebbins

  Although Stebbins’ principal audience is the college freshman, this manual is worthy of consideration for the secondary school student. She covers part of the first phase of the research process—after the principal question has been formed and on to finding and evaluating the information. Such is an essential and critical first phase if students are to learn how to survive in an information-overloaded world. Each chapter guides the learner in a particular genre, including books and e-books, scholarly and popular articles, primary sources, biographical research, legal research, government documents, and citing sources.

  For the teacher-librarian, this book provides clear examples of how to prepare a just-in-time lesson on finding and evaluating information when learners are faced with a particular genre. Consideration should also be given to purchasing several copies if the  teacher-librarian feels that students will profit from having a full guide. 

  I applaud the author for solid ideas on not just finding information but also on the critical piece of evaluating the information. What is missing is the rest of the research process as learners begin to consume the information, analyze it, and then synthesize it toward the creation of a product. It would be wonderful to find a guide that focuses on these higher-level thinking activities because they are often presumed but are not automatic. (Libraries Unlimited, 2006. 220 pp. $45.00. 1-59158-099-4.)

  Bottom line: This book is worth serious consideration for those teaching more advanced searching and evaluation skills at the secondary level. david Loertscher

• Q Tasks: How to Empower Students to Ask Questions and Care About Answers

  Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan

  These authors have written several practical guides for teachers on various aspects of teaching information literacy skills (Info-Tasks, Create your own Information Literate School, and Ban Those Bird Units).  Q Tasks focuses on questions and the questioning process, which the authors consider to be the key catalyst to inquiry. The book’s aim is help teachers to build a culture of inquiry in their classrooms and to nurture an inquiring spirit in their students. Building on Jamie McKenzie’s (Learning to Question, to Wonder, to Learn, FNO Press, 2005) assertion that in order to be information literate students need to be effective questioners, and Neil Postman’s (Teaching As a Subversive Activity, Delacorte, 1969) belief that learning how to ask relevant questions is part of learning how to learn, Q Tasks consists of practical strategies teachers can use to help students become better questioners and to encourage them to develop their own questions. 

   

  In six chapters: “Encouraging Curiosity,” “Understanding Questions,” “Learning to Question,” “Questioning to Learn,” “Questioning to Progress,” and “Moving Forward,” Koechlin and Zwaan provide more than 80 classroom task activities using a skill-building approach that can be used sequentially. The standard format for each activity includes a lesson overview and teacher tips, student worksheet templates, reproducible Q tips pages, curriculum contexts, and techniques of evaluation. The activities include tasks, such as evaluating the reliability of information, analyzing personal issues, setting realistic goals, and testing new ideas.  A number of student organizer templates help students build their own strategies for using information. Particularly useful are elementary and high school level question builder frameworks, time management skill organizers and homework helpers, thesis maps, and frameworks for high school students for building questions using Bloom’s taxonomy. Although the activities are described in detail, the tasks are meant to be flexible and are adaptable to many curriculum contexts. The authors also provide a useful list of print and Web resources on questioning.Bottom Line: This is a useful, practical, easy-to-use resource for teaching information literacy skills. Highly recommended for teacher-librarians and classroom teachers.   (U. S.: Stenhouse, 2006. 144 pp. $20.00. $24.95, 1-55138-197- 4; Canada: Pembroke Publishing, 2006. $24.95. 144 pp. 1-55138-197-4.) Review by Esther Rosenfeld.

• Stimulated Recall and Mental Models: Tools for Teaching and Learning Computer Information Literacy

  Lyn Henderson and Julie Tallman

  Much discussion and research has taken place with children as they conduct research. The most famous is the Kuhlthau studies of students and their behavior during the entire research process. We know that, for them, the process is like a rollercoaster. But what is the view of the process from the person teaching the process?  Henderson and Tallman conduct extensive case studies of different teacher-librarians as they teach a single student to use a database. They do interviews about their perceptions of teaching before the search begins; they record the teaching of the student; and then they do a post interview of each TL’s perception again.

  They title their interview tactic as a stimulated recall, and they are searching for the teacher-librarian’s mental model of the teaching act. The authors spend a great deal of time discussing their methodology, reporting the case, and presenting their findings. In the process, the researchers learn a great deal about interviewing to discern a person’s mental model as a teacher. Their next task in future research is to look at the student’s mental model during the teaching process to see what matches and how the act of teaching and learning could be improved.

  This book is a lengthy research study that is more of interest to other researchers and theorists than to the practicing teacher-librarian. For doctoral students and the theorists of the field, this study is worth considering as another attack on understanding the research process. (Scarecrow Press, 2006. 304 pp. $55.00. 0-8108-5222-5.)

  Bottom line: Recommended to doctoral students and theorists of the field. david Loertscher

• Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity: Strategies for Change

  Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss

   

  This book is required reading of every teacher, teacher-librarian, principal, counselor, and  parent. The book’s content also needs to be discussed with children and teenagers. Cut and paste; cut and paste—these actions are the hallmark of the digital age and are so common in school assignments that many wonder if it is worth the fight. Is it? Well, consider the prospect of going to a doctor who cheated during medical school. Just the impact of ubiquitous cheating on the competence of society as a whole gives pause for thought. Many people simply condemn these students as morally corrupt, but this collection of articles reminds us that the problem applies as much to adults as it does to kids. For example, teachers who assign a paper on a topic of one’s choice give a clear signal about their expectations, and they get exactly what they asked for—and deserve: a paper, complete with references, cut and pasted from material on the Internet.

  The clever teacher, on the other hand, designs assignments and projects for which cheating or plagiarism is not an issue and really cannot be done. It sounds simple, but there are so many complexities to consider, and this collection of articles brings them all to the reader’s attention. A wonderful feature of this book is that a number of short pieces may be copied by the owner of the book for use with groups for discussion, idea generation, or just plain thinking. This collection of articles forms a wide variety of sources and is organized into the following topical sections: “Focus on Honesty and Integrity”; “Leadership in Action”; “Integrity in the Writing Process”; and, “Using Technology with Integrity.” Within each of these sections, articles are broken down into chapters such as: “Creating a School Culture of Honesty”; “Student Voices”; and, “Responding to Students.” This problem is not going to go away soon, and it cannot be ignored. (Libraries Unlimited, 2005. 288 pp. $35.00. 1-59158-275.X.)

  Bottom line: Strongly recommended as one of the essential professional books of the year. David Loertscher

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• nformation Literacy Assessment: Standards-Base Tools and Assignments Teresa Y. Neely (American Library Association, 2006. 216 pp. $40.00. 0-8389-0914-0)

  One approaches a title like this one with a great deal of anticipation.  While created for the academic crowd, one might think it would be of values for teacher librarians. Not so. It is a treatise for people who don’t have teaching degrees so to the teacher librarian, it seems sophmorish. We also found that the recommended assessments were rather simplistic. It demonstrates again that academic librarians are making progress in the whole arena of information literacy but they have much to learn. Not recommended.

• The Research Virtuoso: Brilliant Methods for Normal Brains. Toronto Public Library. Annick Press Limited, 2006. This thin guide is written for high school students as they begin the research process in a library or on line. Covering the normal topics of finding, locating, and evaluating information, it also contains tips for writing the paper. There are many research guides written for students, this one is typical. Many guides such as Noodle Tools, provide online assistance for ciations and other helps. One wonders if printed guides are still valuable, but if you want a variety of guides such as these, then this one should be on your shelves. David Loertscher, Jan 2007

• Project-Based Inquiry Units for Your Young Children: First Steps to Research for Grades Pre-K - 2. Colleen MacDonell

  (Linworth Books, 2006, 136 pp. $ 44.95. ISBN: 158683217-4) Can pre-schoolers and kindergartners do research? Of course they can and MacDonell has good ideas and plenty of sample units. These young folks already ask more questions than anyone can every answer and we can help them to find the answers for themselves. Each lesson begins with a reason to study, discusses the investigation, and provides ideas for the final product. Our only objection is that it does not end with a reflection. What did we learn? How did we find out?  It is not too early to teach this part of the research process because even these budding investigators can get better and better as detectives. Recommended with this one reservation.

• Library Train (Card Game # 20433). Upstart Games. 2006. An easy-to play card game for  elementary-age kids who want to brush up on basic library facts about parts of a book, location of fiction and nonfiction, etc. Not much information literacy here that make kids think, but it should be fun a few times around. Now someone needs to come up with a game that challenges library thinking. David Loertscher  Oct. 2006

• Making the Most of News and Magazines (DVD). Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak. Stenhouse Publishers, 2006. Skip this one. It’s a video about how not to teach information literacy. The teacher, alone in the classroom is having kids rifle through magazine articles looking  for any articles dealing with a U.S. law. No librarian in sight. No real reason for connecting this into  a project – only the hint that it is connected to social studies. If you want to see what not do to, here’s your video. David Loertscher, Oct, 2006