“Information Literacy for Mortals”
Discussion questions for reading groups

PIL Provocation Essay #5: “Information Literacy for Mortals,” December 14, 2021 (3,702 words)
Author: Mike Caulfield, Invited Author, PIL Provocation Series
Read the author’s reflections on what inspired this essay, December 14, 2021

Questions prepared by the PIL Provocation Series Team: Alaina Bull, Steven Geofrey, Barbara Fister, Alison Head, and Margy MacMillan, Project Information Literacy (PIL) Team, December 16, 2021.

About “Information Literacy for Mortals”

In this essay, Mike Caulfield draws from decision-making theory to claim that a “less is more” approach to evaluating information on the web has great value. He contends that students who learn a simple process for deciding where to spend their attention can quickly determine what information to trust and how to trust their own judgement, especially when looking for civic information in their everyday lives.

Purpose and intended use of this resource

“Information Literacy for Mortals” offers a wide variety of lessons about reconsidering how to advance civic information literacy and web evaluation instruction. How can we build on capabilities that students use to evaluate information in their social contexts to encourage better information habits? How can we use the social strengths of the web to make evaluation more efficient? How can we help students (and people, in general) who get lost down rabbit holes of irrelevant detail when trying to apply evaluation criteria? Or simply, why does more effort often result in less useful assessment?

This essay makes an argument grounded in research while posing questions for the future. What new directions in information literacy and higher education should we be exploring? What fundamental aspects of student experiences with navigating information spaces have we overlooked? What fresh ideas can we advance to inspire librarians, educators, researchers, students, journalists, and policy-makers?

These OA prompts are designed for an audience of librarians and educators to provoke discussion around the themes in the essay, suggest ways to advance teaching and learning in your institutional context, and open up new avenues for inquiry and experimentation. The questions posed here are meant as a starting point to use and draw from in developing discussion questions that work for your context.

Questions or comments? Drop us a line at: projectinfolit@pilresearch.org.in

Discussion questions

1. In his PIL Provocation essay, Mike Caulfield starts with an example of decision-making in his own life that demonstrates psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer’s contention that “more information, more calculation, and more precision makes us substantially worse at bottom-line decision-making.”
   1. Can you think of a recent example of how this has happened in your own life?
   2. How did you know when to stop gathering information?
2. “Information Literacy for Mortals” makes the case for building on students’ existing strategies for evaluating information and mapping them to new information environments.
   1. What barriers hold students back from transferring strategies from their personal lives to their academic work?
   2. Can students develop an understanding of the trustworthiness of web sources like they often develop trust in their peers? How would you encourage them to map the similarities between these processes?
3. What is “fallibility of human reason,” according to Caulfield, and why does it matter more than ever on the web when finding and selecting information for decision making in our everyday lives? What does Caulfield argue happens when “we don’t know the future and tend to distort the present''? How does this relate to your classroom experiences?
4. Mike Caulfield argues that using simple rules of thumb can often yield better results than complex analyses, particularly for non-experts. That is, fast decisions can be more accurate than slow, considered ones.
   1. What rules of thumb do you use to make quick decisions and direct your attention?
   2. What factors encourage students (or others) to delve deeply into examining a particular source when a swift judgement would suffice?
5. The “moves” that SIFT recommends for deciding where to put your attention are designed for the web, where attention is at a premium and messages are often fashioned to grab a user’s attention in not-so-helpful ways.
   1. Why do the four moves from the SIFT method — Stop, Investigate the source, Find out what others say, and Trace claims — work so well with “encountered information” on the web?
   2. Could those same moves be used in teaching evaluation of scholarly sources? How might they be adapted for that context?
6. Caulfield cites recent research that indicates the SIFT method has had a positive impact on students’ evaluation practices.
   1. Have you used SIFT with students? What impact did it have on how they approach evaluation tasks?
   2. In your instructional situations, where do you see the SIFT method fitting in well?
   3. What benefits (and/or disadvantages) do you think the SIFT method might bring if you incorporated it more in your teaching?
7. What is “overfitting,” and how does Caulfield apply this term from statistics to describe the overfitting of search results?
   1. What’s an example you’ve seen of “noise” factors that interfere with students’ evaluation of information resources?
   2. What role do the criteria we often ask students to use (currency, format, perspective) play in overfitting?
8. In the essay, Caulfield makes a deliberate distinction between student and citizen information needs. He writes, “the citizen is often not looking for academic precision, but to make good decisions under conditions of uncertainty.”
   1. Given that these roles may call for different strategies, how do we balance learning and teaching evaluation strategies for both contexts?
   2. What are some examples of the “conditions of uncertainty” in academic work?
9. In the essay, Mike Caulfield notes the differences between the “persistent belief in higher education that all thinking is just a degraded form of research” based on the individualistic academic practices we lionize, and the social nature of knowledge where “quick judgments about the reputation of claims and sources can be more valuable than deep personal analysis of them.”
   1. How can librarians and educators help students develop an understanding of the social nature of knowledge?
   2. Do you think of information literacy as a social or an individual practice?
   3. Now think about your own pedagogy. Do you teach information literacy as a social or an individual practice?
10. Mike Caulfield ends the essay with an anecdote about a surprising student response to a prompt in the classroom, and in his author’s note, he reflects on the pivotal role this interaction played in composing the essay, articulating that the essay “was about that moment of student relief, the transgressive joy in hearing the answer to a problem might not be more studentness after all.”
    1. What is “studentness” and what does it look like in your discipline?
    2. Are there places in your pedagogy where this studentness potentially gets in the way of students developing literacy (information, graphical, data, visual, or anything else) that is situated and embedded in more real-world contexts?
    3. What are some concrete ways in which traditional pedagogy in your discipline might be redesigned to counteract this?