Teaching Information Fluency describes the skills and dispositions of
information fluency adept searchers. Readers will receive in-depth
information on what it takes to locate, evaluate, and ethically use
digital information. The book realistically examines the abilities of
Internet searchers today in terms of their efficiency and effectiveness
in finding online information, evaluating it and using it ethically.
Since the majority of people develop these skills on their own, rather
than being taught, the strategies they invent may suffice for simple
searches, but for more complex tasks, such as those required by academic
and professional work, the average person's performance is adequate only
about 50% of the time. The book is laid out in five parts: an
introduction to the problem and how search engine improvements are not
sufficient to be of real help, speculative searching, investigative
searching, ethical use and applications of information fluency. The
intent of the book is to provide readers ways to improve their
performance as consumers of digital information and to help teachers
devise useful ways to integrate information fluency instruction into
their teaching, since deliberate instruction is needed to develop
fluency. Since it is unlikely that dedicated class time will be
available for such instruction, the approach taken embeds information
fluency activities into classroom instruction in language arts, history
and science. Numerous model lessons and resources are woven into the
fabric of the text, including think-alouds, individual and group search
challenges, discussions, assessments and curation, all targeted to
Common Core State Standards as well as information fluency competencies.
