TLs and information behaviour

How does a student’s developmental stage impact their information behaviour and what is the influence of this on the role of the TL? Record your understanding on a new blog post.

It should come as no surprise or revelation that the developmental stage of students must be considered when setting information literacy learning goals and experiences. Information behaviour, as presented by Laretive (2019) in her research being the combined information needs, information seeking, and information usage will be influenced by several developmental factors, including the cognitive and social. Teacher librarians now have several documents to guide developmentally appropriate teaching and learning in areas of information literacy. The Australian Curriculum General Capabilities, particularly Critical and Creative Thinking and Digital Literacy, and the New South Wales Department of Education’s Information Fluency Framework assist TLs at making develpmentally appropriate teaching and learning sequences for students.

At the start of my time in the role as TL in 2010, I attended some professional development on the newly devised Research Skill Development Framework from the University of Adelaide because I was desperate for some guidance on the mandate to ‘teach them (students) research’ which was being requested by classroom teachers. Without any library qualification training, this was an enormous task which I was unsure how to approach. It seemed clear to me that this would involve a spectrum of skills. Since, I have learned how correct this was, but also the need for an agreed upon set of ideas like information literacy and a shared, working understanding of the word ‘research’ itself.

When we applied the RSDF to a selection of de-identified (as much as possible) research tasks across Years 2-10, we found that the demands on students were not sequential. In that TL led PL, all teachers agreed that the most demanding task belonged to a Year 4 assessment and not to the Year 10 assessment. This was an enormously successful activity to drive home to all present, and myself, the need to consider the soft skills, and the developmental age of our students when setting tasks.

In Laretive’s article, she breaks down the shift from talking about and thinking about information as ‘a product to be given out’ as stated by Kulthau, to something which meets a students’ needs. New approaches- or applying constructivist ideas and Dervin’s Sense Making theory- propose the centrality of the information user to not only information but the seeking and use of information. Importantly, the awareness of the information user and their own information behaviour makes for a more literate user. This is absolutely aligned with successful and widely adopted programs like Harvard’s Visible Thinking which states that the more educators can make students aware of the thinking they are doing, and giving them time and the language to reflect on themselves as learners, the greater their engagement with their learning and the stronger they become as learners.

TLs must collaborate with classroom teachers to map developmentally appropriate information literacy skills, care of guiding documents like the General Capabilities, to the teaching and learning of KLAs in the classroom. The TL must promote a more refined understanding of research, information behaviour, and an information literacy model in the school.

Laretive, J. (2019). Information literacy, young learners and the role of the teacher librarian. Journal of the Australian Library & Information Association, 68(3), 225–235. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1080/24750158.2019.1649795

Laretive, J. (2019, May 17th). Information literacy and young learners [Presentation]. Softlink. https://www.softlinkint.com/downloads/Josephine_Laretive_-_Information_literacy_and_young_learners.pdf

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