Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education

Abstract

The quickly changing information and technology landscape requires increasingly sophisticated information literacy skills for the navigation, evaluation, and use of information (Jenkins, 2006). Teachers play a key role in providing students with diverse opportunities to learn how to use information wisely. Those preparing to become pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade (PK-12) teachers require a comprehensive understanding of information literacy to guide their own knowledge creation activities that will ultimately affect their future students. Yet, researchers have shown that future teachers often enter teaching without the necessary information literacy skills and knowledge (Laverty & Reed, 2006). Experiences in pre-service, graduate, and continuing education programs shape how teachers model and facilitate student learning in their own classrooms. The development of information literacy tools and knowledge is fundamental to teacher education students’ abilities to evaluate and use diverse and continually changing information sources in their academic work and pre-service teaching. Once in their own classrooms, PK-12 teachers model for their students how to critically navigate the current maze of information and how to use information to construct credible arguments: Information literacy competence enables pre-service teachers to develop a robust understanding of the role of information in their lives, and to model information literacy to PK-12 students.