Presented at LILAC 2010

1. Geoff Walton, Academic Skills Tutor:
Librarian, Staffordshire University
Demolishing the
Seven Pillars: a
warning from
research?

2. SCONUL ‘SEVEN PILLARS’ MODEL OF
INFORMATION LITERACY

3. PLAN
 Introduction - my motivation for doing PhD
 Research project
 My intention to build a picture to illustrate what students
did during the learning interventions and reveal what
their thoughts and feelings were for each stage
 Implications for models of information literacy
 New assessment tool for measuring levels of
information discernment
 Concluding remarks

4. INTRODUCTION
 My original motivation to prove the ‘correctness’ of
information literacy as a model and ‘expose’ VLEs
as the ‘emperors new clothes’
 Having completed my PhD my views have changed
somewhat!
 My own personal PhD journey
 ‘proof’’ and ‘correctness’ are problematic
 IL models don’t seem to be sensitive to the cognitive
and affective processes that impinge in becoming
information literate
 VLEs, or more generally e-learning, offer very promising
pedagogical opportunities

5. RESEARCH PROJECT – RESEARCH QUESTION
AND HYPOTHESIS
 How do the psychological states associated with
information behaviour and thinking help explain the
learning processes in an information literacy
blended learning and teaching intervention?
 Students who participate in online social network
learning (OSNL) will demonstrate:
(1) a greater degree of knowledge about e-
resources
(2) a greater ability to evaluate information
than those who do not receive this intervention

6. RESEARCH PROJECT - METHODOLOGY
 Participants
Sport & Exercise first year
undergraduates in first year core module
Effective Learning, Information and
Communication Skills (ELICS)
Three tutor groups who received the following
delivery:
 A. Face-to-face workshop plus interactive web tools
plus online social network learning (n=12)
 B. Face-to-face workshop plus interactive web tools
(n=11)
 C. Face-to-face workshop only (n=12)

7. RESEARCH PROJECT – DATA GATHERING
INSTRUMENTS
Focus-group interviews (Group A)
Questionnaire (Group A)
Post-diagnostic test (All groups)
Assessment - portfolio (All groups)
Annotated bibliography
Reflective practice statements
Reflective essay

8. RESEARCH PROJECT – CODING FRAMEWORK
FOR QUALITATIVE DATA
Codes based on:
 Bloom’s taxonomy
 Hepworth’s information behaviour
model
 Moseley et al

9. RESEARCH PROJECT – FACE-TO-FACE
WORKSHOP
Overall context – Roles and
norms
 students studying at university and bring
some prior knowledge with them
Task – Problem-based scenario
part of portfolio assignment
 Examples in the one hour ‘hands-on’
activity-based workshop mirrored the
problem-based scenario for the
assessment (see p1 of handout)

10. RESEARCH PROJECT – FACE-TO-FACE
WORKSHOP
Behaviour
 Interaction with source
Source character
 “looking at the library catalogue”,
“search the library”
Source behaviour
“you can look for a certain subject [on
the catalogue]”
“you [the tutor] showed us what to do”

11. metacognition
I have realised
that these
sources contain
information that
can help me to
develop while
studying at
university
You can get
involved in the
sessions yourselves
more hands-on, it
was active
Being able to
find out the
books was
really
interesting

12. FACE-TO-FACE WORKSHOP
Knowledge
 Factual knowledge
“it [the library catalogue] allowed me to see
what books were available and where I could
find them”
 Process knowledge
 “you don’t necessarily need to know what
book you are looking for [on the catalogue],
you can look for a certain subject”
New behaviour
 “I [now] use the online library to search for e-
books and books”

13. ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK LEARNING
 Task - to find out how to evaluate web-pages by
discussing the issue online
 Used a questioning approach for example,
 So, how would you decide what makes a good quality web
page?
 Structure of process (see p2-3)
 Behaviour
 Interaction with sources
 peers, tutors, Berkeley website on evaluating information, the
Internet Detective, and the tutor-summary for example,
“we had to feedback on each others. I remember I was
commenting on his [posting], he was commenting on mine”
 See examples of a postings on p3-4

14. metacognition
[The tutor summary] gave the whole
group a bit of recognition [...] you
read through what other people
thought of URLs and took advice
from other people not just the
lecturer’s, it worked really well, it is
a good way of reflecting what
you’ve done

15. ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK LEARNING
 New knowledge
 Both in terms of postings to the discussion and the tutor
summary and final summary handout – synthesised
output from discussion (see p3-6)
 Transition to a feeling of less uncertainty
 “It makes you aware, a little bit more aware of what web
sites are more useful to you than others and there are
quite a lot of web sites on line and you don’t want to be
writing stuff in your assignments that’s not true. [Before]
I didn’t know what the things at the end like .ac. org
meant […].”
 (Changed) Behaviour
 “I have used [the evaluation criteria] actually, since we
did it for essays and stuff, since we did these things in
Effective learning it actually alerted me to what to look
for when looking for a good web site and what to steer
clear of.”

16. COMMERCIAL BREAK
 All and more in the
book!
 Practical examples of
learning and teaching
interventions
underpinned by theory
 Face-to-face learning
 Online learning
 Based on empirical
research

17. ASSESSMENT
 Task
 Answer the problem-based scenario see p1
 Behaviour
 Found six resources, two books, two journal articles and
two web pages, evaluated them and then wrote about it

18. Analysis
Evidence via
assessed work
transcripts see
examples on p7k

19. ASSESSMENT
 New knowledge
 “I have acquired new knowledge on the Library
Catalogue, Swetswise, e-journals and the Web. I now
know how to look for E-journals and E-books on
Swetswise and E-brary, something I did not know how
to do before.”
 Task completion
 See assessed work transcript on p7
 Changed behaviour
 “I will incorporate this new knowledge and skills in the
future by using these skills when completing a new task
e.g. I can use the online library to search for e-books
and books.“

20. OTHER EVIDENCE (QUANTITATIVE DATA)
 Assessment (one-way ANOVA statistical test)
 Annotated bibliography
 Variety of evaluation criteria
 Experimental group used greater variety of evaluation
criteria than either groups B or C, but not statistically
significant
 However, large effect size (using Eta squared test) found –
therefore, if this part of the study was carried out again with
nineteen subjects per condition it would have produced
statistically significant results
 Frequency of evaluation criteria
 Again, similar result to variety measure
 However, large effect size - to gain a statistically significant
result in a future study would require between twenty and
twenty five subjects per condition.

21. OTHER EVIDENCE (QUANTITATIVE DATA)
 Post-delivery diagnostic test – 14 multi-choice questions
on the library catalogue, e-journals, referencing and
evaluating web pages (analysed using one way ANOVA
statistical test)
 Test scores between Group A (experimental group) and Group
C (control group) are significantly different at
p < .025, t= 2.66 , Degrees of Freedom (df)= 22 (within
groups).

22. IMPLICATIONS FOR MODELS OF INFORMATION
LITERACY
 They are too rigid and over simplified
 The step-by-step approach indicated by some models
doesn’t necessarily reflect how the person becomes
information literate
 They don’t seem to reflect (or harness) the social
nature of learning
 SCONUL model in particular does not recognise that
potentially any student can synthesise information and
produce new knowledge
 Don’t take into account the affective dimension
 ‘Grand narratives’ which aren’t sensitive to context

23. THREE SPHERES OF INFORMATION LITERACY
Spheres
can
occur in
no
particular
order
Find/
access/
locate
Evaluate/
discern
Use/
communicate
/ produce
Each sphere triggers its own set of behavioural,
cognitive, metacognitive and affective states
Becoming information literate takes place in a
wider social context determined by roles, norms
and tasks

24. NEW TOOL FOR ASSESSING INFORMATION
DISCERNMENT
 Level 1 - Students unaware or unconcerned
regarding the need to evaluate information and
may tend to use information without checking its
quality - see p7-8 for more detail
 Level 2 - Students have an emerging awareness
of the need to evaluate information which is
expressed weakly through notions of detail,
suitability or quantity
 Level 3 – Students aware of the need to evaluate
information for quality but see the process in
black and white, true or false, either/ or terms

25. NEW TOOL FOR ASSESSING INFORMATION
DISCERNMENT
 Level 4 – Students aware that evaluation isn’t
simply a matter of black and white, they recognise
the need to judge each source on its merits and
talks about balance, deciding and using a range of
criteria in the evaluation process.
 Level 5 – Level 4 plus - students operating at this
level can talk about the nature and relative value of
evaluation criteria in a given setting

26. CONCLUDING REMARKS – A THEORY (SEE P9)
 Becoming information literate appears to be about
an individual completing a task in a given context.
This context leads to the interaction with sources
(e.g., databases, e-journals, books, e-books, peer
and tutors) and in so doing brings about the
interplay of an individual’s behavioural, cognitive,
metacognitive and affective states. It is this
interplay which determines the level of new
knowledge learnt (or produced or both) and the
degree of changed behaviour (i.e., level of
information literacy) exhibited.

27. REFERENCES
 Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, D., Furst, E. J., Krathwohl, D. A. and Hill, W.
H. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of
educational goals: handbook 1: cognitive domain. New York: David
McKay Company Inc.
 Hepworth, M. (2004). A framework for understanding user
requirements for an information service: defining the needs of
informal carers. Journal of the American Society of Information
Science and Technology, 55 (8), pp695-708.
 Hepworth, M. & Walton, G. (2009). Teaching information literacy for
inquiry-based learning. Oxford: Chandos.
 Moseley, D. Baumfield, V., Higgins, S., Lin, M., Newton, D., Robson,
S., Elliot, J. and Gregson, M. (2004). Thinking skills frameworks for
post-16 learners: an evaluation. a research report for the Learning &
Skills Research Centre. Trowbridge: Cromwell Press.