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After conducting a school wide information skills audit in 1999,
the Curriculum committee at Santa Maria College recognized the need
to promote information literacy. To prepare students for our
rapidly changing, information dominated world, it is necessary that
they become independent, flexible thinkers and learners who are
able to acquire the skills and knowledge they need at particular
stages in their lives.
The information literacy process has 6 stages, each of which
involves a range of thinking skills as follows:
The Teacher Librarians at Santa Maria have worked
very closely with the teams of teachers in each Key Learning Area
to create assignments incorporating the information literacy
process. Students then spend class time in the library for each
assignment learning the skills in the process and applying such
skills to the task at hand. What sets the information literacy
project at Santa Maria apart from well designed projects in other
schools is that at Santa Maria, the Library team is able to
demonstrate that the process is successful. There is evidence that
the project is enhancing thinking and learning.
The project began in 2000 with a group of Year 7s
and has been re-run for Year 7students from that time onwards. The
initiative tracks the learning development of students from Year 7
through to Year 10. Throughout the project surveys are conducted,
data is collected and results published. Statistics have been used
as a tool to identify the students’ skills and plan an appropriate
programme to further develop their independence as learners. The
survey results for each student group show that the students have
made excellent progress in understanding and practicing the
information process.
Across the board, students have developed the most
improvement in the area of evaluation of learning processes as well
as the end product. Students have also made significant improvement
in presenting/creating their work as well as in the key research
stage of organizing ie: note taking, translation and synthesis of
information. The data collected provides hard evidence that
educational outcomes have improved for the students and that the
project has been a great success. But most importantly, the
students are increasing their awareness of themselves as learners
and have made a great start in their journey as independent
thinkers. | 