Information Literacy, some more thoughts.

Yesterday was a big study day and some thoughts that arose were around the article by Herring and Tarter. Their research produced interesting results, many positives as you would expect when it was conducted by the originator of the model. The most interesting thing to me was the comment about transference of skills from one curriculum area to another. This has cropped up before and in later readings on this topic others mentioned this. Herring states that this idea of transference needs to be actively encouraged by staff because it won't happen otherwise. He says this "Thus the authors recognise that enabling students to transfer information skills across subjects and year levels should be an important aim within a school and that future studies could be designed towards this end. The authors also recognise that information literacy in the school context is not equivalent to information literacy in many workplaces” (retrieved from interact resources site 24.8)

He also mentions in the (Herring 2006) article the importance of metacognitive skills in the process of learning. The understanding from this is that it isn’t all roses,this might not be the way. Just giving them a process is not enough, It needs more than that to prepare for higher education and the workplace. I liked the idea of other skills such as reading body language being part of the curriculum. This suggests that more important is a curriculum designed to include all areas, so a more open design allowing for the development of these skills also across a whole school.

This would mean that the school had a IL policy, one that all teachers took on board. This would certainly raise the profile of the TL, but it would also make it better for them as others would be aiming for the same result in a way that was supported by the school leaders. These ideas were also found in the Wolf reading as well as he commented on the use of scaffolds ‘A major issue in relation to metacognitive strategy instruction is that many students use a strategy when required, but fail to use it when the requirement is removed (Cavanaugh and Perlmutter 1982). This suggests that a model other than direct instruction would be beneficial to students. Costa (1984) and Brown et al. (1984) advocated for the infusion of strategy instruction throughout the curriculum' Wolf later conceded that this use of scaffolding being transferred to other tasks can only be achieved if they are 'made aware that this is one possible strategy to use in order to successfully navigate problem situations.’