Developing data literacy competencies to enhance faculty collaborations

Abstract

In order to align information literacy instruction with changing faculty and student needs, librarians must expand their skills and competencies beyond traditional information sources. In the sciences, this increasingly means integrating the data resources used by researchers into instruction for undergraduate students. Open access data repositories allow students to work with more primary data than ever before, but only if they know how and where to look. This paper will describe the development of two information literacy workshops designed to scaffold student learning in the biological sciences across two second-year courses, detailing the long-term collaboration between a librarian and an instructor that now serves over 500 students per semester. In each workshop, students are guided through the discovery and analysis of life sciences data from multiple sites, encouraged to integrate text and data sources, and supported in completing research assignments.