In an information driven economy, it is necessary to develop information literacy skills, especially when searching for information about chemicals. An online assignment, "Identifying Expert Sources of Information", was developed for the second quarter lab to help students explore and evaluate the types of online resources that provided information about chemicals. Students first chose a molecule that had a use as a health supplement. Then they reported the type of information available from a web search engine, Wikipedia, ChemSpider, and a scientific database. For each source, students described the information available according to the 5 W's (Who, What, Where, When and Why) and wrote an ACS style reference for each source. At the end of the assignment, students were asked to complete a 100-200 word reflection about finding authoritative sources of chemical information. In subsequent lab, students were explicitly asked to search for information from these resources and provide appropriate references to them in their lab reports.<br/><br/>This assignment was developed while revising the general chemistry lab curriculum at the University of Washington Bothell to incorporate guided inquiry and sociocultural context in meaningful ways. In this talk, we will discuss how this assignment fits within the lab curriculum and provide a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of this assignment. Assessment will be provided through student self-evaluation of their information literacy skills and instructor evaluation of student performance.

Teaching information literacy through the chemistry laboratory

255th National Meeting (2018)

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