One of the joys of being department chair is creating a curriculum map for information literacy learning outcomes — as part of a five-year program review for a department that is only two years old. Since I’m teaching research methods, a requirement for students in all three of the department’s interdisciplinary majors, I decided to make information literacy a focus of the course. I designed several brief assignments based on chapters in Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics that pertain to evaluating information sources for authority, reliability, and relevance. These tasks in turn complement, in my mind at least, two larger assignments: Amanda’s Best Breakfast in Town project and writing a research proposal.
I thought I’d post some of those assignments here on the blog along with an assessment of how well students did on them. First topic on the list is hypothesis construction:
- Naked Statistics, Ch. 1.
- https://www.mobilecoveragemaps.com/. Click on Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania to see mobile phone coverage in each country.
Given the availability of mobile phone coverage in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, how can we infer which country is the most violent? Why? (Generate a hypothesis about a relationship between mobile phone coverage and violence.)
Students did a good job thinking of possible causal relationships between mobile phone use and violence. Class discussion included ways to operationalize the concepts of violence, wealth, and happiness, which we did with some quick internet research. Students did not find an association between homicide rate and the amounts of mobile phone coverage in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, which then led to the topic of sample size. The assignment seemed to work as I had intended.
Links to all posts in this series about information literacy: