Information Literacy Toolkit

In this course, students choose a country in Latin America and investigate educational inequality based on gender, race/ethnicity and socio-economic status.  The assignment is scaffolded throughout the semester.  In the first assignment, students write a brief demographic overview of their country.  The librarian briefly visits the class to teach students how to find credible background information sources and discuss how the context of this background information will help them as they move through the project.  In the second assignment, students find and compile data about education and gender, race/ethnicity and socio-economic status in their country, resulting in graphs and explanations.  The class comes to the library for a session where the librarian has them conduct a data evaluation exercise, and then teaches them how to use a few important data sources from the UN and World Bank.  In the third assignment, students write an annotated bibliography and a paper.  The class comes to another session in the library to learn how to find and evaluate scholarly sources, and reports and research published by NGOs, research centers and other organizations.