Helene N. Andreassen

Teaching It All

With a student-centered perspective, this chapter gives advice on how teachers, fresh or experienced, can undertake IL teaching development, or refinement of existing methods and material. Using research and our own teaching experience as empirical basis, we suggest pedagogical methods which have proven successful in IL teaching. Divided into three parts, preparation, implementation, and assessment and evaluation, this chapter consists of a combination of general practical advice, example situations, possible exercises and activities, and tips on how to optimize use of technology in the teaching situation.

The Importance of Being Information Literate

This opening chapter serves as an introduction to the topic of information literacy (IL) and the role of IL in both academia and in society in general. We delineate our purpose with the book, which is to broaden our concept of what IL is and why including learning strategies and academic formation in the IL definition can increase student learning. The chapter furthermore briefly looks at challenges connected to dropout rates in higher education and how IL teaching can ease the transition from secondary to tertiary education. Even though the book primarily focuses on IL in an academic setting, we also believe that IL plays a major role in lifelong learning and that IL skills are necessary in almost any line of work. The chapter ends with a short summary of the succeeding chapters.

Things We Know About How Learning Happens

This chapter provides a selective review of some of the research that has helped us understand how learning happens. We will briefly describe the human cognitive architecture, looking at how both its strengths and limitations affect our ability to learn. We also consider approaches to learning and teaching, motivational aspects of learning, and some of the research on what actually seems to work best in teaching and learning. We believe that as IL teachers, we all benefit from continually working to develop our conceptions of teaching and learning, using the best available evidence from educational research and the learning sciences to do so.

Information Literacy: The What and How

This chapter presents the 21st century version of the concept of information literacy (IL). It reviews current practices in IL teaching and takes a quick look at present-day challenges. The chapter further highlights elements we consider missing from teaching practices, and thereby forms a bridge to the remainder of the book, where we address those missing elements.

Toward Academic Integrity and Critical Thinking

This chapter connects to the normative basis of information literacy, and the values and attitudes of academic production of new knowledge. It starts with an introduction to the phenomenon of “Academic Bildung,” understood as independence and personal engagement, in other words the process of adopting and being integrated into academic ways of thinking and learning. This process is also desired to be a process towards academic integrity and critical thinking. Academic integrity can be described as the moral code of academia, and this chapter argues that it has its source in research integrity. Critical thinking is the activity of seeking out valid and justified reasons, and it is a set of skills as well as an educational ideal. Academic integrity and critical thinking, as parts of Academic Bildung, are vital for truly being information literate in higher education. This chapter finally explains how motivation theory in the form of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) can be seen as an empirical and descriptive counterpart of the normative education-philosophical theory of Academic Bildung.

Chapter Four – Learning Strategies

Building on our conception of information literacy and our understanding of learning and teaching, this chapter looks at research on learning strategies. If we accept that learning and information literacy are inextricably entwined, then deepening our understanding of effective and not so effective strategies for learning should allow us to better help our students become life-long, information literate learners. In this chapter, we also attempt to point out the inherent affinity between effective (deep) learning strategies, and the thoughts and actions of an information literate knowledge seeker.

The behavior of secondary consonant clusters in Swiss French child language

This paper aims to determine the behavior of secondary clusters in Swiss French child language and, in doing so, provide a first step towards the identification of the order of acquisition of primary and secondary clusters. The data first of all reveal that the variant with schwa is in a global fashion preferred to the variant without schwa, and this regardless of the child’s mastery of primary clusters. The data further reveal that the occasional production of the non-preferred variant without schwa entails modifications of the secondary cluster in conformity with the child’s relative mastery of consonant sequencing. While secondary clusters pattern with primary clusters when it comes to repair strategies such as gliding and realization of an interconsonantal reduced vowel, they diverge from the latter when it comes to cluster reduction: there is a general preference for the preservation of C2, irrespective of the sonority profile of the cluster.