First Annual Information Literacy Boot Camp

     Seventh graders embark on research projects in several of their courses during their first year at Northwest, and the teachers and I agreed that there was a need to align these projects so that students learned a process for research and then logically built on those skills as the year progressed. However, we recognize that students come to Northwest with varying degrees of familiarity with the research process. For this reason, we decided that an Information Literacy Boot Camp in the first month of school would be beneficial for ensuring that all students had a foundation for research and some experience in 5 core skills:

1. Creating and refining research questions
2. Selecting and modifying keywords for effective searching
3. Evaluating information sources based on the C.R.A.A.P. criteria
4. Note-taking in Easybib (We have a paid subscription to Easybib so that students can create accounts and save their work in projects here. This is the same platform they will use as high school students in our district.)
5. Citing Sources in Easybib

     7th grade literacy teachers (Anah Austin and Jess Harris) and I worked together this summer to create lessons that addressed all these skills and implemented the 9-day Boot Camp from September 2nd-12th. After the Boot Camp we asked students to reflect on their own level of comfort with the skills we addressed and respond using Google Forms:

 

     Although, these numbers reflect students own thinking about their research skills, they will still give us a baseline to look at growth throughout the year as they embark on 4 research projects in their core curricular areas of Literacy, Language Arts, Science, and Global Studies. We plan on administering this same form towards the end of the year.

 

     Overall, I think the Boot Camp was very successful. Next year we will be changing the pacing of the unit by breaking the lessons into 2-day blocks of time over the course of 3 to 4 weeks. We felt the students lost focus at the end, and needed to have some of the routine of the regular classroom environment so early in the year. We also plan to refine our essential learning outcomes and implement more differentiated instruction strategies so that students are able to pace themselves through the lessons. We found this to be especially necessary during the Easybib note-taking and citation lessons and will address our problems by making a series of short instructional videos so that students can move through the skills at their own pace and review key concepts. (For example, citing an image or creating a project.)