The Enquiring Minds Project at Staffordshire University: Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum and Assessment

This is the latest version of this item.

The article discusses the work of the Enquiring Minds team at Staffordshire University (part of the Institute of Industrial Law), with a particular focus on information literacy principles and requirements, and the relevance of IL in helping students improve their research skills. Among other things, consideration is given to the need to give students effective opportunities to undertake legal research projects and to deploy their skills, for example in small group project work, and in some cases articles and other published work, as contributions to the 'knowledge pool' which teaching and learning programmes can draw upon. The article discusses approaches to embedding information literacy principles and standards in teaching and learning programmes, modules' learning outcomes, and assessment systems.

Themes in the article are developed further as part of the author's work in K. Puttick ‘Enquiring Minds and the Role of Information Literacy in the Design, Management and Assessment of Student Research Tasks' (chapter 5)in A.Pope and G.Walton (eds) ‘Information Literacy: Infiltrating the Curriculum, Challenging Minds’, Oxford: Chandos, 2010.