Promoting Information Literacy in the Study of the U.S. Congress

Faculty: Paul Dawson, Professor of Politics
Librarian:
Course:

1. Description of the project

   Misconceptions about the U. S. Congress form easily and are resistant to change. The superficial and often biased nature of journalistic coverage of Congress, focusing as it does on personalities and political strife, fails to illuminate the attention given by many Members of Congress to pressing social problems and the relationship between political forces and progressive policy change. Superficial and biased press coverage, coupled with and reinforced by pejorative predispositions about Congress, has unwarranted and undesirable consequences on students and other citizens; namely

   • A tendency to disengage from the political process, abandoning the field to those who tend to be driven by intense, narrow, and self-serving interests;
   • The creation of an ignorant and easily enflamed public, too vulnerable to demagoguery and manipulation;
   • Frozen intellectual development, since students often lack the sort of information literacy that would allow them to test both their preconceptions about Congress and the indictments of Congress that are voiced by others who have their own political agenda; and
   • Low levels of political empowerment, since students and other citizens cannot easily see where, when, and how they might intervene into the lawmaking process.

   In an attempt to contribute to ameliorating these undesirable consequences, this project seeks to equip students with a level of information literacy and with specific information literacy skills that makes the U. S. Congress more transparent and, thereby, creates a potential for both intellectual program and civic engagement. (The proposed project is elaborated below.)

2. Time line

   Instructional materials will be developed during the month of August (2002). These materials will be incorporated into the version of the course that will be taught in the first semester of 2002-2003. During and immediately after the use of these materials, qualitative and quantitative data will be gathered as the basis of an assessment of the project.

3. Faculty time to be devoted to the project

   Full time during the month of August (2002) and throughout the first semester of 2002-2003

4. Other sources of financial support

   None

An Elaboration of the Proposed Project

Premise

For students of Congress to acquire information literacy, they need to be able to:

• Start with a clearly defined need for information; and
• Find and use information that meets that need.

Implications and Project Goals

The above premise implies a somewhat inductive approach to acquiring information literacy, one that starts with, and remains true, to a student's research question. If their research question drives their search, they are:

• less likely to be overwhelmed by a top-down overview of all possible sources of information;
• more likely to become more skilled users of information;
• better able to internalize efficient and effective information literacy skills;
• better able to make selective, well-target use of what they come to see as relevant sources of information; and
• more likely to view information literacy as a pre-requisite to sustained and independent intellectual development.

This premise and its implications suggest a way of approaching the task of promoting information literacy in the study of Congress.

Our Traditional Approach

In the past, we have taught information literacy in more of a top-down fashion; i.e. through an overview of major sources of information, we have introduced students to where they might look for answers. Moreover, we typically do this early in the semester, before students have formulated their research questions. Students, therefore, are faced with the rather daunting task of acquiring generalized knowledge about many different information sources before they know why -- and exactly how -- they might use them.

Our traditional approach was reasonable; it was a way of promoting information literacy to students who had yet to formulate what we expected to be idiosyncratic research questions.

It may be possible to improve upon our traditional approach, however, by conceptualizing, in advance, the kinds of research questions that students will pursue.

Research Questions

The are four main research questions likely to be asked by a student of Congress (and of the policy making process in general):

1. How does a bill become a law? (Lawmaking)
2. How do objective conditions come to be viewed by members of Congress as "problems" requiring governmental action? (Agenda Formation)
3. How do ideas become bills? (Policy Development)
4. How does congressional action serve to define issues for upcoming election campaigns (Election Positioning)

A Proposed Approach

It may be possible to promote information literacy by organizing our instruction around each of t hese research questions.

Kinds of information needed, by research question:

1. Lawmaking
   • Legislative histories: Introduction, floor comments, hearings, debate, conference committees, floor action, presidential action
2. Agenda Formation
   • What objective conditions suggest the existence of a problem? [E.g., quantitative and qualitative data, academic studies, research institute reports, governmental agency documents, congressional hearings]
   • What attempts have been made to deal with the problem? (E.g., any documentation of private [profit and nonprofit] and governmental [local, state, and/or federal] attempts)
   • Have prior attempts fallen short? [E.g., evaluative studies by academics, research institutes, testimony and data presented at congressional hearings, newspaper accounts]
3. Policy Development
   • What ways of dealing with the problem have been proposed? (By anyone)
   • Who advocates these approaches? With what arguments?
   • In what ways are ideas being transformed into specific legislative proposals?
   • In what ways are legislative proposals developing?
   • What alternative funding and implementation methods are being discussed?
   • o In what ways is the development of a specific policy proposal impacted by other congressional issues and external events?
4. Campaign Issue Development
   • What specific actions are suggestive of emerging campaign issues (that may come to play an important role in upcoming congressional and especially presidential elections?)?

The proposed project focuses only on promoting information literacy in regards to Research Questions 1 and 2. (Research questions 3 and 4, requiring the most contextual analysis, will have complex and difficult to specify information sources. While work on promoting information literacy for these kinds of research questions may be proposed in a future grant application, such an effort is beyond the scope of this proposal.)

Specific Work to be Undertaken during the Grant Period

(To contextualize the specific work to be undertaken during the grant period, the following first elaborates the information needs of the 25-28 students in Politics 203.)

In Politics 203, each student is required to complete a substantial research project that counts directly for 40% of their course grade and, overall, for 60%.

Students may select one of the following two projects:

• A Lawmaking project, in which the student attempts to answer the research question: How did a bill become a law? (How in what ways is a current bill moving toward possibly becoming a law?)
• An Agenda Formation project, in which the student attempts to answer the research question: How do (objective) conditions come to be viewed by Members of Congress as "problems" requiring their attention and action?

For either project, students will conduct original empirical research on the congressional process, relying mostly on primary information sources. This research effort will result in three required written documents:

1. An intermediate paper that provides a detailed legislative history, either of the process by which a bill became a law or the process by which a "problem" moved onto the congressional agenda;
2. A final paper that attempts to explain the events documented in the first paper; and
3. A Research Log that documents their day-to-day search procedures.

To help students acquire the kind and level of information literacy that is necessary to carry out these research projects, the collaborating librarian, Megan Mitchell, and I will develop and use three sets of instructional materials, to be presented during three (75 minute) class sessions in the first four weeks of the semester. Each of these proposed sets of instructional materials is described below:

Instructional Materials (and activities) to be developed during the grant period

Set I. An Overview of Government Documents

These materials are the ones normally covered in a one-session introduction to government documents, including hard copy and online sources of information on the congressional process. To supplement this standard presentation, we will, during the grant period, develop the format for a workshop during which the students in the course will break into small groups, apply what they've learned to some information seeking task, present what they've done and critically assess their search procedures.

Set II. Constructing a Legislative History and a Research Log

During the grant period, we will develop instruction materials that describe and illustrate how to identify:

• Possible events in the history of a public law;
• Alternative sources of information that might be used to document a legislative history; and
• The efficient and effective use (and citation) of these sources of information.

To assist students in learning from these materials, we will develop a set of workshop activities that give students a chance to apply what they've learned, as we circulate among small groups of the students in the course.

In addition, during the grant period we will:

• Develop a model of a Research Log; and
• Write instructions for constructing, keeping, and posting a Research Log.

Set III. Describing the Agenda-Formation Process and Constructing a Research Log

During the grant period, we will develop instruction materials that describe and illustrate how to identify:

• Events that signal the arrival, on the congressional agenda, of an objective condition as a "problem" that deserves legislative attention and possible manifestations of the terms in which Members of Congress perceive the problem. (For example, poor infant nutrition was an objective condition for decades before Members of Congress began to comment on the large numbers of WW II draftees who were rejected as physically unfit.)
• Events that signal the movement of a problem through Congress; and
• The ways in which Members of Congress express their understanding of the problem and of policy proposals for dealing with it.
• (This set of materials also will include the above instructions for the constructing, keeping, and posting of a Research Log.)

The efficient and effective use of these materials by students in Politics 203 will contribute d irectly to their successful completion of the required research project and the two required research papers and, perhaps more importantly, to the realization of the above project goals.

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