Information literacy is a fancy term for knowing how to find, evaluate, and use the resources you find. It is essential that you learn information literacy skills, not just for your academic research but because you need to be able to find, evaluate and use the information you find in your every day life as well. As nurses, you will not always be writing papers, you will have to stay current in your profession by reading professional literature. You will need to find information about hospital procedures, address issues around promoting good health, and understand current trends in nursing. Misinformation is common and thinking critically is essential. Being information literate means that you have acquired those skills.
Learning is more effective when new information is meaningful and linked to some personal experience or prior knowledge. Learning is about both context and content. It is necessary to learn how to assess, evaluate, and connect in order to make information become knowledge. Information literacy skills are the hallmark of the ability to do research. What is important is for you to learn how to find information that “matters” and then figure out why it might matter. You also need to be able to tune out the information that doesn't matter so you don't get bogged down when when working on your projects.
Information literacy is a link between the life experiences of you as a student, the academic world of scholarship, and the post college real world of application of learning. An information-literate person has the ability to ask questions and knows the difference between ignorance and understanding. (When do I need information?) Information literacy builds a lifelong ability to determine where information is kept (Where is the best place to find this?) and in what forms knowledge is stored (Which knowledge products will likely have what I need?).
Information literacy relies on the use of a critical mind to discern credible from not credible, valid from not valid. It is actually the core of the first-year experience. It lasts, while the specifics of particular courses fade over time. After all, the nature of research, the core of higher education, is a learning process: “How do I learn about something?”
What Is the Difference between Information and Knowledge?
Life is a series of problems needing solutions. You make hundreds of decisions every day, from small decisions like when to brush your teeth to big decisions like career and relationship decisions. You may not even be aware that you are making many of these decisions. Not every decision takes a great deal of thought but together, they create a world in which you need to find information, turn it into knowledge and then apply it to your life. Information, like data, only matters when you can turn it into knowledge by exploring and applying it to your decision making process.
You need to find information that matters and then explore why it matters. Curiosity, then, is a response to an environment of exploration, resulting in wanting to know “why” or “how.” How do you make sense of the world? How does information translate to knowledge? Connecting ideas, thinking critically, acting responsibly, and communicating effectively are all essential to lifelong learning and active engagement in today’s world. You need to become proficient, ethical users and producers of information in a globally connected world. It is important to be able to reason, manage resources, work productively with others, acquire and evaluate information effectively, organize information, interpret and communicate the information, and work with an ever-evolving variety of technologies. In other words, you need to become information-savvy consumers and creators. You need to be able to adapt to, understand, evaluate, and make use of technology so you can be citizens that shape our society, rather than letting technology shape you!
Questions to consider:
How do you know that your sources are reliable?
What are thinking skills?
How do you evaluate your resources?
Where do you go to find print and online resources?
When conducting any type of research, you need to have a firm grasp on information literacy, or knowing how to find and access the sources you may need. Practicing good information literacy skills involves more than simply using a search engine such as Google, although that could be a starting point. You also engage in creative thinking (i.e., generating topics to research), analytical thinking (i.e., reading and examining the parts of sources), and critical thinking (i.e., evaluating sources for accuracy, authority, etc.). Then you have to synthesize the results when you use multiple sources for a research project. Information literacy utilizes all of the necessary thinking skills. If you saw the name of a person on the cover of a magazine, for instance, you might assume the person did something important in order to have their name and/or picture on the magazine. If you were to google the person’s name, you would need to use context clues to determine if the information you found is actually about your person and not about someone else with the same or a similar name. Then you have to decide if the information is accurate and if it is current. If it is not accurate or current, you would need to continue your research using other sources.
Check Your Sources
The American Library Association defines information literacy as a set of skills that allow you to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” We need information almost all the time, and with practice, you’ll become more and more efficient at knowing where to look for answers on certain topics. As information is increasingly available in multiple formats, not only in print and online versions but also through audio and visual means, users of this information must employ critical thinking skills to sift through it all.
In today’s information environment, what would be the best way to find valid information about climate change? Would it be Wikipedia, NASA, a printed encyclopedia from 1985, or a report from a political campaign?
If you chose any answer except the NASA website, can you see how the other answers could be biased toward a particular theory? The encyclopedia may not intentionally attempt to mislead readers; however, the write-up is not current and science changes as we learn more about the world around us. Wikipedia, as an open-source encyclopedia where anyone may upload information, might not be reliable enough to lend full credence to the articles. A government organization that does not sell items or opinions related to the topic and provides its ethics policy for review is a much better source. In fact, government resources are often called "grey literature." Grey literature is often authoritative and accurate but may not go through the peer-review process as an academic journal might. This level of critical thinking is the only way to ensure you have all the information you need to make good decisions about what to include in your paper.
You likely know how to find some sources when you conduct research. And remember—we think and research all the time, not just in school or on the job. If you’re out with friends and someone asks where to find the best Italian food, someone will go an app on their phone to present choices. This quick phone search may suffice to provide an address, hours, and possibly even menu choices, but you’ll have to dig more deeply if you want to evaluate if you will like the restaurant. Mostly like you will look for reviews, or personal testimonies. You might even read the ratings on Google.
Why is it important to make sure your sources are credible? The words we write (or speak) and the sources we use to back up our ideas need to be true, honest, and verifiable or we would not have any basis for distinguishing facts from opinions. Sometimes an opinion may be, at the least damaging level, only uninformed thoughts but, at the worst level, it could be an intentionally misleading and distorted version of the truth. Learning to tell the difference and only using verifiable facts is a hallmark of a strong thinker.
You probably see information presented as fact on social media daily, but as a critical thinker, you must practice verifying facts, especially if something you see or read something in a post that conveniently fits your perception. This is called confirmation bias and it means we tend to believe things that support our current belief systems, often without making sure they are credible. You may be familiar with the Facebook and Instagram hoaxes requiring users to copy and paste a statement that they will not grant permission for these social media sites to make their private content public. At best, this type of hoax reinforces our belief that we can control social media and at worst, this type of hoax may create a false sense of security that what we post will remain private. Maybe you’ve seen posts and memes that associate famous people with memorable quotations that were either inaccurate or belonged to another person. We may even allow ourselves to believe inaccurate claims as truth when we experience different emotions including anger, fear, or loneliness; we want to believe a claim is true because it aligns with how we are feeling, regardless of any verifiable source. Be diligent in your critical thinking to avoid misinformation!
Determining how credible a source is typically includes looking into the author’s credentials, experience, and status in the discipline; the actual content of the source material; any evidence the source presents as support; and whether any biases exist that may make the source questionable. Once you know who controls the content of the source you’ve chosen, you need to determine what biases or special interests the site or article may exhibit. You may not find all the information above but if you don't find enough to support the claim, you should find another source.
Activity - Reflecting on bias
Reflecting on Bias
Reflect on what bias the following sites may have. Without consulting the Internet, write one to two sentences on what ideas the following organizations may present. After you consider these on your own, conduct a search and see if you were accurate in your assumptions about the entities.
National Dairy Council
Yoga Society
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
The American Medical Association
Whatever you write should be correct and truthful. Reliable sources present current and honest information backed up with evidence you can check. Any source that essentially says you should believe this “because I said so” isn’t a valid source for critically thinking, information-literate individuals, like you are becoming!
Books and Articles
Evaluating books, articles, and websites for validity presents different challenges. For books and scholarly articles, in print or online, you can typically establish if the source is current and from a reputable publisher or organization with information on the copyright page or journal publication information. If you are unsure, you can ask your librarian to help you evaluate the book you are looking at.
Scholarly articles, like the one below, may be found on Google Scholar, on the open web, or in your library's databases. No matter where you find them, if they are truly scholarly, they will provide information about the author(s), the journal and will follow a format that supports their claims with research data. If you are using a magazine article, you will have to do the research into the author and publisher bias' on your own.
Figure 9.2: The most reliable sources of online information may be journals or related research-oriented websites, which include the author names, their credentials, and other data. However, unless they are “peer-reviewed,” meaning independent experts have read and verified the quality of the information, even credible-looking sites may be more opinion- than fact-oriented. (Credit: Springer Open. Sprongeropen.com [fireecology.springeropen.com])
Websites
For a website, you should determine who owns the site. Is it a professional organization such as the American Medical Association? You can usually find this info in the About section of the site or in a copyright designation near the end of the landing page. Domain names can help you determine the purpose of the site, but you shouldn’t rely solely on this website marker. Be sure to use a system like CRAP (Currency, Reliability, Authority, and Purpose of the source) or Lateral Reading. Lateral Reading is when you evaluate a source by asking the following questions:
Who funds or sponsors the site where the original piece was published? What do other authoritative sources have to say about that site?
When you do a search on the topic of the original piece, are the initial results from fact-checking organizations?
Have questions been raised about other articles the author has written?
Does what you’re finding elsewhere contradict the original piece?
Are credible news outlets reporting on (or perhaps more important, not reporting on) what you’re reading?
Table 9.1 Domain types
Domain
User
.edu
Used by educational institutions (i.e., colleges, universities, school districts); usually reliable sources of information, but individual members of these institutions may be able to create web pages on the site under the official domain that do not reflect the values of the school
.com/.biz
Used by commercial or business groups; may be valid, but also may be used to sell products, services, or ideas
.gov
Used by government agencies; typically valid
.org
Used by organizations, such as nonprofit groups or religious entities; may present information slanted toward a specific denomination or cause. You’ll need to conduct additional research to verify validity.
.net
Originally created for networks or groups of people working on the same problem, .net is still a viable option for noncommercial sites such as personal blogs or family websites. You’ll need to conduct additional research to verify validity.
Many other domains exist
Research the validity of domain names outside these most common ones.
Critical Thinking
When you look into books, articles, and documentaries about how to think, you will find plenty of choices. Some books or articles about thinking may seem to apply only to a narrow group of readers, such as entrepreneurs or artists. For example, the audiences for these two books about thinking seem highly selective: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark may be mostly directed to the science community, and James Lohan’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Taught Wrong is likely of interest primarily to historians. And some chapters may focus specifically on those groups; however, most texts on thinking are also applicable to other disciplines. You may have to work a bit harder to find a common ground or generate your own examples that explain the concepts from the book, but you can still reap benefits from understanding different perspectives. Don’t immediately disregard a book or article just because it doesn’t seem to fit your perspective on the surface; dig a bit more deeply to see what you can learn. Remember, being open-minded and considering as many alternate approaches as possible are two hallmarks of critical thinking.
Steps to Evaluate a website
One of the most consistent uses for critical thinking in your college work is in considering the value of research material and deciding how to use it. The Internet gives you access to an almost unlimited amount of data, and you must choose what to use carefully. Following are some guidelines.
Look at the URL, the Web address. It can give you important information about the reliability and intentions of the site. Start with the page publisher. Have you heard of this source before? If so, would you consider it a reliable source for the kind of material you are about to read? Now consider the domain type in the URL, which follows the period after the publisher: “.com” and “.biz” are used by commercial enterprises, “.org” is normally used by nonprofit organizations, and “.edu” is reserved for educational institutions. None of these is necessarily bad or good, but they may give you a sense behind the motivation for publishing this material. Are you dealing with a company or the Web site of an individual—and how might that affect the quality of the information on that site?
What can you learn from poking around with navigation tabs or buttons, and what do they tell you about the objective of the Web site? Look for a tab labeled “About Us” or “Biography.”
Consider what others are saying about the site. Does the author offer references, reviews, or quotations about the material? What do they say? Check the blogosphere to see what other people think of the author or Web site.
Trust your own impressions about the material. Is the information consistent with what you already know?
Ask yourself why the Web site was written. (To inform? To provide data or facts? To sell something? To promote a cause? To parody?)
Finding Print and Online Resources
When you need to research a topic, you probably start with a search engine. That can be helpful, but can easily lead you complicate your search with incorrect or inaccurate websites and waste your time. Use advanced searches, filters, and other means to target your results more specifically. However, don’t limit yourself to just Internet sources; print journals, books, and articles are still significant sources of information.
Your college may have access to extensive stores of subscription-based site content, photos, videos, and other media through its library, providing more than enough information to start researching and analyzing any topic. Depending on the specific database and school, you may be able to access some of these resources remotely; others may require you to visit the library in person. Remember, when you are gathering and arranging pieces of information, keep track of the source and the URL so that you can both cite it correctly and return to learn more if needed. If you are using databases to search; use the permalink, email or save your article.
Some other more general places to explore educational, inspirational, and thought-provoking material follow:
Exploring the TED website is worth a few minutes of time. There you’ll find short videos (limited to 18 minutes) of speaking demonstrations by diverse experts in fields covering all disciplines. If you are in an exploratory phase of your thinking and researching, you can scan the TED Talk topics related to your interest area.
You may be familiar with the Khan Academy, created in 2008 by Salman Khan, as an online learning resource for students and teachers containing tutorials, videos, and practice sets in a variety of subjects from science and mathematics to grammar lessons.
Online courses provided by Coursera, Udemy, and Udacity, provide learners and thinkers the chance to take courses, attend webinars and discussions, and learn about a large number of subjects, often free of charge. Much of the content is provided by major universities, and the courses are often facilitated by faculty.
For-profit companies and nonprofit groups such as the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) can also help you hone your thinking. The FCT presents materials, seminars, and conferences to help people think with “clarity, relevance, logic, accuracy, depth, significance, precision, breadth, and fairness.”
Creating a System for Managing Resources
You could have all the money (or time or cars or great ideas) in the world, but that won’t do you any good if you haven’t also created a way to organize and keep all your resources. In the same way you might feel overwhelmed with all the choices when a waiter gives you a book-sized menu with hundreds of options, you can get lost or lose your sources if you don’t have an effective and efficient way to access all the great articles, websites, books, podcasts, webinars, and other idea resources you find for your project, college course, or life event.
Systems to manage your ideas and thoughts don’t need to be elaborate. The best idea-management system is the one that gets used, so you need to be comfortable with what all is involved in managing these thoughts. Keep in mind, once you get into the swing of researching for and keeping good ideas, you’re going to end up with resources in many different formats. Gone are the days when one shelf of an oak bookcase near your desk could contain all your thinking resources on a topic. You may still find books, so you don’t need to discard the bookcase just yet, but very likely, you’ll also have online resources including search results, document files, websites, blogs, audio files, videos, and more. You can use filing folders, binders, online folders, boxes, or computer systems to organize your ideas. The system you use depends on how you choose to organize your material, there is no correct or incorrect system.
Like physical clutter, a messy online environment can slow your productivity and clear thinking. One key to effective information and idea management is a simple, consistent labeling system. Some companies call this a naming protocol or naming convention, a standard way all online files, folders, and drives are labeled for easier retrieval and long-term storage. If you don’t think through a file name with this forward-looking approach and then you don’t access that file for several months, you aren’t likely to remember which file is which, and you may end up wasting valuable time opening random files in an attempt to find the one you need. This isn’t a very efficient way to operate, and in some work environments would not be acceptable. For example, if you were taking an upper-level literature course studying poetry, and remember you filed an excellent summary of one of the poems a few years earlier in your freshman composition class, you won’t be too happy when you have 78 documents called Notes. Great idea—lousy document/idea management system. Use folders with descriptive names and use dates when applicable. If you are keeping folders for your courses, name the folder using the name of your course. That way you can always find what you need quickly.
If your searches will take place on multiple devices--a laptop and a smartphone, you could use a notetaking app. For example, you could even use a series of Google Docs or Sheets, as long as you consider the file naming and organizational conventions mentioned above. For example, if you needed to put together a research paper requiring 20 data sources, you could use a spreadsheet to keep track of the source article name, author, topics, potential data points you plan to use, the source, and the URL. Even if you didn’t incorporate everything into the final paper, such a method would save you a lot of time trying to track down small pieces of information. (The sheet would also be a great reference when you write your bibliography.)
Finding print and online sources demands a great deal of time and effort. Understanding how different approaches to thinking are appropriate for various situations as you research will help you be more creative and critical as you identify and verify your sources.
Activity- Matching Thinking Types
Matching Thinking Types
Quite literally, all careers need thinkers. Many jobs today expect employees to come up with original ways of doing routine tasks. Nurses may consider a more effective way to convey necessary information about patient care to other members of the medical team. Teachers must reconcile individual student learning needs with the reality of large classrooms. Attorneys think about all the consequences of presenting a client’s case in a certain manner. And chefs balance the cost of using the finest ingredients with customer preferences and profit margins.
Any career you can imagine has some amount of thinking involved. The most successful workers in any industry are the ones who think beyond the ordinary limits or expectations established in that profession and create new and improved ways to do ordinary jobs.
Consider the types of thinking required for the jobs in the table below.
Table 9.2 Industry and Thinking Types
Industry
Job Title
Job Descriptions
Thinking type Required
Transportation
Air traffic controller
Regulates air traffic for outgoing and incoming aircraft; responds to emergencies; schedules planes to specific gates to minimize delays
Healthcare
Pediatric oncology nurse
Cares for critically ill children; assists doctors in diagnoses, treatment, and examinations; communicates with patients and care providers
Internet technology
Computer analyst
Maintains computer hardware and software systems; troubleshoots user problems; suggests modifications for improved productivity
Education
College professor
Teaches, evaluates, and guides post-secondary students through various academic subjects working toward various degrees and certificates
Footnotes
3 “Information Literacy.” American Library Association. Accessed February 1, 2020. literacy.ala.org/information-literacy/
