Library Educational Services

Library instructional programs continue to seek meaningful ways to infuse information literacy instruction into both general education and discipline-specific courses, through a logical sequence, building on prior knowledge to transferable skills. The mission of this approach is to move through a series of steps, from understanding what information literacy skills can be infused in your instruction, the conversations and collaborations with faculty and departments, and the assessment and evaluation of your instruction and alignment with professional standards and goals.

Curriculum mapping is a tool liaison librarians can use to:

1. Identify courses where Information Literacy skills are a logical addition/integration into the curriculum.
2. Help with programmatic assessment.
3. Better understand the program being studied.

Curriculum mapping can help answer the questions:

1. Who is doing what?
2. How does our work align with our goals and learning outcomes?
3. Are we operating efficiently and effectively?

Curriculum Mapping helps identify Gaps in Information Literacy instruction.

Gaps occur in any of the following situations:

• Your instruction is overduplicated for some courses/levels while ignoring others.
• Your learning outcomes are overduplicated in some courses/levels while not appearing in others.
• There is a lack of increasing sophistication as a curriculum progresses.
• There are redundancies, teaching the same outcomes the same way at different levels or in different courses.
• There is a complete lack of strategy.

Curriculum maps can contain numerous elements, but the most important are:

1. What is taught (the content, areas of expertise addressed, learning outcomes)
2. How it is taught (learning resources and opportunities)
3. When it is taught (timetable, curriculum sequence)
4. Measures used to determine if the student has achieved the learning outcomes (assessment)

Steps in Curriculum Mapping:

1. Look through course listings to identify courses that would be good candidates for Information Literacy instruction.
   • Example: Courses that are required (e.g., introductory, research methods, capstone).
   • Example: Courses that state they require a research component or a research paper.
2. After courses across the continuum of a student's career (e.g., 100, 200, 300, 400-level) have been identified, review the IUPUI Information Literacy Learning Outcomes and determine how you plan to sequence the outcomes through the curriculum.
   • Example: First-year students are introduced to APA citation standards. Seniors should be adept at citation standards.
3. Meet will disciplinary faculty to discuss your map.
   • There may be better courses for IL integration of which you are unaware.
   • Buy-in will probably not be 100%, at least to start.
4. Implement instruction in the identified courses and assess learning outcomes.
5. Discuss instruction and assessment results with faculty to make tweaks and adjustments to map.

Some thoughts to keep in mind when talking with disciplinary faculty:

• The existence of gaps should not be surprising, given that instructional services are typically offered ‘on-demand’ and therefore tend to overserve some courses and underserve or ignore others.
• Approaching library instructional services from a curricular perspective allows students to be introduced to concepts or skills when these are needed and allows faculty and librarians to reinforce or build upon these concepts or skills as they reappear and become more demanding in later courses.
• Some faculty are not interested in providing more class time for library instruction, but modules and other ‘packages’ of instructional materials can be produced and introduced in the Learning Management Software; this allows for instructional services to be provided and assessed without taking up scarce classroom time.
• It may be best to focus on required courses within the curriculum.
• Requesting faculty change their assignments can sometimes cause trouble. If the class is important to IL integration one strategy is to ask them what deficiencies they notice in student performance. That will often bring comments of "they can't cite" or "they don't find good sources." This is the perfect opportunity to introduce IL and what librarians can contribute to the course.
• Work with faculty whose assignments create a need for students to have better information-seeking skills or to become more acquainted with information literacy concepts.

These standards may help you in determining what courses to target as well as allowing you to understand the bigger picture of student education at IUPUI under which all departments work.

Common Core

Articles that discuss curriculum mapping.