I use this activity every year in the lab section of General chemistry. At this level of chemistry students are rarely doing research work that involves chemistry literature, and don’t necessarily have chemistry research questions or a need for understanding the library research databases for for the class. However, students at this level are engaging with science information in the classroom and outside the classroom, and this is a great opportunity to build skills needed to engage with information in online spaces. 

Since I developed this assignment, Mike Caulfield has developed a new framework based on the Four Moves, called SIFT. At this point I’ve stayed with Four Moves and a Habit because it comes with an open textbook that I can assign pre-class reading from, and because the named concept of lateral reading has been useful for students.

Many thanks to Andrea Verdan, Seattle University Chemistry, for her work on developing this lesson plan and developing the pre-lab quiz questions.

I use this activity every year in the lab section of General chemistry. At this level of chemistry students are rarely doing research work that involves chemistry literature, and don’t necessarily have chemistry research questions or a need for understanding the library research databases for for the class. However, students at this level are engaging with science information in the classroom and outside the classroom, and this is a great opportunity to build skills needed to engage with information in online spaces. 

Since I developed this assignment, Mike Caulfield has developed a new framework based on the Four Moves, called SIFT. At this point I’ve stayed with Four Moves and a Habit because it comes with an open textbook that I can assign pre-class reading from, and because the named concept of lateral reading has been useful for students.

Many thanks to Andrea Verdan, Seattle University Chemistry, for her work on developing this lesson plan and developing the pre-lab quiz questions.

I frequently use this activity for first year research classes across a wide variety of disciplines when the faculty member teaching the class has asked me to demo databases. I have also used it with great success in higher-level discipline specific classes including biology and my colleagues have used it with graduate students. This activity works best for classes with a research assignment and when students have received the research assignment and are starting to think about their research topic prior to the IL session. However, I've also had classes where students have not yet received their research assignment and working with a single research question as a whole class works just fine. In that case, I usually have a research question that I've created that we can work with but with discipline specific classes we've also created research questions together at the beginning of class.

Students were asked to write either their preliminary or final research questions on a sheet of paper. Questions were then assessed using the rubric.

This assignment was created for a first year composition course in collaboration with the instructor. She wanted to use infographics as a method for teaching multimodal writing, and I wanted a strategy for showing how to read scholarly articles. This activity was conducted on my second visit to class, so students already had instruction on source types and characteristics of scholarly articles. We'd also had a discussion about the concept Scholarship as a Conversation. I spent the class time following the lesson plan as written, and the following class day the students had time in the computer lab with their instructor to create their own infographics. The final essay for the class is an argumentative essay, requiring 5 sources, 2 of which must be scholarly. An infographic summarizing one of the scholarly articles is required as an attachment to the essay.