ILILE grant recipient 2006
Project Goals
- To provide an opportunity for teacher education students (Middle Childhood) to practice skills and ideas taught in the Reading methods course in a school setting.
- To increase information literacy content in a course focused on teaching of reading and writing to middle level students.
- To experience the value of collaboration between teachers and school library media specialists.
Activities
- Students attended two information literacy workshops led by the education librarian.
- Each student served as a Research Buddy for a 4th or 5th grade student at a local elementary school. Students made six visits to the school.
- Teacher education students worked with the students to investigate a series of questions assigned by the elementary school teachers pertaining to a unit of government (grade 4 – three branches of Ohio state government; grade 5 – Preamble to the U.S. Constitution).
- Elementary school students compiled a Citizen’s guide to share the results of their research and presented the guides to parents and visitors at the end of the project.
- Teacher education students created and implemented a lesson plan for the Research Buddy project that included grade level indicators for the Ohio Technology/Information Literacy standard.
Assessment
- Field experience of teacher education students working with “real” students instead of just hearing about students in class enriched the Reading methods course for students.
- Opportunity to observe the role of a school library media specialist was useful.
- Students learned firsthand about the need for differentiation of assistance for different children.
- All students met the summative objective of the project which was that 90% or more of the Otterbein students would score at least an overall “3” on the 4-point assessment rubric for the project.
Artifacts
- Guide for Implementing an Information Literacy Project into an Education Methods Course (doc) (pdf)
- Assignment description. (doc) (pdf)
- Project descriptions created by teachers. (doc) (pdf)
- Sample Citizen’s Guide brochure. (doc) (pdf)
- Sample unit plans. (doc) (pdf)
