Fostering Critical Thinking in First-Year Students through Information Literacy Instruction

Abstract

As students encounter high volumes of misinformation in online environments, cultivating critical thinking is an important goal of information literacy instruction, especially for first-year college students, who are just beginning to develop cognitive habits in their early years of postsecondary schooling. However, this study demonstrates that the relationship between critical thinking and information literacy is not obvious, and relatively little has been recently studied regarding how academic librarians incorporate critical thinking into their library instruction. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the researchers sought to understand how academic librarians who primarily instruct first-year college students conceive of, teach, and assess critical thinking skills in relation to information literacy.