First-Year Information Literacy: Assignment Ideas

• What makes a source authoritative? How does authority affect a source's content? Ask students to find and examine sources on the same topic. Have them write a paper that examines how the author affects the content of each source. Encourage students to examine multiple types of sources --- scholarly articles, popular magazines, webpages, Wikipedia, books, newspapers, etc.  You may also want to require that students examine sources from multiple disciplines.

• Search Strategy Reflection Paper: Ask students to include short reflection paper with their list of references. The paper should encourage students to reflect on the search process -- keywords used, search tools, new search skills they learned, and any problems they encountered. Ask students to reflect on the usefulness of making mistakes in the search process and how searching is not solely transactional.

• What's are the differences between quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing? Provide students with a short excerpt that they can use to practice these skills. Ask students to reflect on what purpose quotations, paraphrases, and summaries serve for their own writing.

CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments) is a pilot open access educational resource developed for faculty and librarians in higher education. It aspires to become a repository of user- contributed research and information literacy assignments.