Open AccessTeaching Information Literacy Skills to Senior Undergraduate Engineering Students
Author(s) -
Jennifer Congyan Zhao,
Michael Rabbat
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
proceedings of the ... ceea conference
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2371-5243
DOI - 10.24908/pceea.v0i0.4891
Subject(s) - information literacy , curriculum , lifelong learning , set (abstract data type) , workforce , medical education , engineering education , literacy , computer science , engineering ethics , psychology , engineering , engineering management , pedagogy , medicine , political science , law , programming language
Information Literacy Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology establish a set of abilities for students to recognize their information needs, access information effectively and efficiently, evaluate information critically, and use information in a legal and ethical way. The Standards aim to help students accomplish academic goals in their studies and build lifelong learning skills, and they are also well-aligned with the CEAB graduate attributes. Moreover, it is important that students acquire these skills before completing their undergraduate degrees since, upon entering the workforce, they will need to investigate problems and communicate complex ideas with colleagues and clients in both written and oral format, and they will not have the same support available as when they are in university. The authors, an engineering librarian and instructor, collaborated in the Fall 2012 semester to offer two information literacy training sessions within a final-year electrical and computer engineering course. This paper presents the topics and pedagogies used in this training and discusses the challenges that the authors encountered. Recommendations on integrating information literacy training into engineering curriculum are also provided.