Information Literacy for Today's Diverse Students

Book excerpt: This book helps students from diverse backgrounds and with various learning styles to master the material they learn with these practical examples for librarians teaching higher education information literacy. Cultural influences in students' lives—often tied to aspects of their background such as ethnicity, national origin, socioeconomic status, gender, and religion—play a large role in determining how they learn. Learning styles additionally differ among students, making it difficult to know how to best support all students. This book introduces academic instruction librarians to a differentiated instruction (DI) approach that will help them to offer students a choice of how to engage with course content, assess their understanding of the material, and demonstrate mastery of the material to the instructor, allowing students to actively participate in their education. It explains various instructional techniques used in DI and provides detailed, step-by-step examples for implementing educational technology tools supporting each technique. Accompanying the examples are tips for overcoming known challenges in implementation and best practices for successful adoption of the techniques. Readers will understand how to begin using the most popular types of educational technology tools for academic information literacy instruction.