Data Set: Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy

Data Author(s): Amy R. Hofer; Korey Brunetti; Lori Townsend

Description:

The goals of this research were to:

• Identify student stumbling blocks in information literacy through surveying information literacy instructors
• Identify potential threshold concepts by analyzing these stumbling blocks for the underlying broad transformative themes using the threshold concept criteria.

As John Creswell states, analyzing qualitative data "is an eclectic process" with the aim of generating fresh insight into the problem being studied while building a fuller understanding. In this case, it is not a goal to prove quantitatively that all librarians agree about specific troublesome concepts. Rather, we seek to identify areas for deeper exploration and potential application of the threshold concept framework.

Survey Instrument:

We used an open-ended qualitative survey to query information literacy instructors. The survey was conducted using SurveyMonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/). Invitations to participate were posted in September 2010 to three listservs: ALA's Information Literacy Instruction Listserv, Australian Library and Information Association User Education Listserv, and the JISC Information Literacy Listserv. The survey invitation was reposted until we received enough responses to reach saturation. Saturation, as defined by Christine Daymon and Immy Holloway, is "a state where no new data of importance to the specific study and developing theory emerge and when the elements of all categories are accounted for." In our case, saturation was indicated by seeing the same troublesome concepts identified repeatedly by different respondents.

The survey asked the following:

• Please identify three key concepts or big ideas that your students struggle to understand.
• Describe each, then answer the following:
  • What do you think is the main reason your students struggle with this concept?
  • As a librarian, how does your approach to this idea/concept differ from that of your students?

We did not introduce practitioners to the threshold concept framework as part of the survey. This is because—as is frequently pointed out in the threshold concept literature—threshold concepts are an idea that can take some time to fully grasp (in other words, threshold concepts are a threshold concept). We often found that as we revisited Meyer and Land's position paper to test our ideas according to their definitional criteria, what had looked like a promising threshold concept, in fact, wasn't. Therefore, we could not expect our respondents to absorb an entire pedagogical theory in a ten-minute survey. However, librarians were asked to comment on student struggles in order to encourage them to elaborate on the troublesome nature of the concept. We also asked them to differentiate their understanding from the student approach because one of the primary features of a threshold concept is its tacit nature among experts and its simultaneous inaccessibility to beginners. We hoped that making this dichotomy explicit to participants and asking them to explain it would help to identify threshold concepts underlying the troublesome content.

Abstract:

Librarians regularly encounter students who struggle to understand and apply information literacy concepts. A qualitative survey administered to information literacy practitioners asked about troublesome content and analyzed results using the threshold concepts pedagogical framework first described by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept transforms the learner's view of content and helps integrate previously learned material; threshold concepts are portals that, once traversed, bring insight into how to think and act like a practitioner within a discipline. This project uses the data collected to propose seven threshold concepts for information literacy.

Access and Use Requirements:

This data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

When citing this data set, please use the following:

Hofer, Amy R.; Townsend, Lori; Brunetti, Korey (2012): Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy [dataset]. University of New Mexico. http://hdl.handle.net/1928/23092

Keywords:

threshold concepts, information literacy, troublesome concepts

Related Publications:

Hofer, A. R., Townsend, L., & Brunetti, K. (2012). Troublesome concepts and information literacy: Investigating threshold concepts for IL instruction. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 12(4), 387-405.

Project Files: