Teaching Expert Information Literacy Behaviors through Decision-Based Learning

Abstract

Standards for information literacy challenge institutions to create expert depth of knowledge in students. One potential way to do this is through an instructional method called Decision-Based Learning, which seeks to build conceptual, procedural, and conditional knowledge explicitly. This paper details the results of a multisemester study involving groups of engineering and technology students taught using this method. Students tended to engage with a pre-class learning module based on the new method more fully than the comparable groups of students used pre-class instructional videos. Those taught with the new method also showed significant improvement in their performance in post-tests.