As you no doubt tell students, research is a conversation, and this week the conversation involves student misperceptions of the research process.

This is a topic recently explored in a 2018 paper by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Allison Rand, and Jillian Collier, all librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their work, “Predictable Information Literacy Misperceptions of First-Year College Students,” in turn continued a conversation, as it leaned on Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005), a seminal book on instructional design that discusses how, in all fields, “any domain of learning, instructors will have developed a sense of the typical errors learners make.” In their paper, Hinchliffe, Rand, and Collier describe a study they performed (the research-gathering step of the study was sponsored by Credo and Hinchliffe presented a related Credo webinar) in which they interviewed librarians about first-year students’ misunderstandings about the research process. Freshman students, they found,

Instructional librarian Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe has been researching what misconceptions about information literacy students carry with them to college, and investigating what types of pedagogical responses best correct these. In a recent webinar she discussed the challenges of teaching information literacy to first year students, and shared her initial findings. Download the full recording here, and view her presentation slides here.  

We recently surveyed hundreds of faculty members across the country to gain a better understanding of how they perceive students’ information literacy skills. More than 200  faculty responded to an open-ended question about what impact poor student information literacy skills had on their work. Almost two-thirds reported time lost addressing this gap and preparing information literacy materials, and five percent stated that it affected their decision on whether or not to assign research projects.