Scaffolded information literacy and data literacy instruction within undergraduate science and engineering laboratory courses: A longitudinal assessment

Abstract

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators view science process skills like designing hypotheses, finding relevant technical information, synthesizing literature, analyzing data, visualizing results, and presenting findings as among the most valuable things a novice scientist can learn within the undergraduate curriculum. These skills overlap considerably with the competencies academic librarians categorize as information literacy skills: formulating research questions, assessing information needs, organizing information, synthesizing multiple sources, and communicating findings across multiple different media formats. We explored whether laboratory courses were an effective context for information and data literacy by scaffolding instructional interventions across three years of the undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) curriculum. Utilizing a longitudinal pre-test/post-test design, we analyzed students' performance on multiple-choice and open-response assessments to evaluate their knowledge gains and retention over time. Our results indicated statistically significant improvements in students' ability to identify appropriate information sources and relevant library-licensed resources for different types of technical information. This suggests that science and engineering students can benefit from having librarians consistently offer guest-lectures throughout their academic careers, if these instructional interventions are customized to align with the specific tasks students will be expected to complete within their coursework. These findings also emphasize the importance of librarians and STEM educators collaborating to design instructional interventions together to create customized learning experiences that align with course objectives.