Course name: Multiple courses
Faculty: Nancy Knop, Margie Shade, Dick Hawes, Nan Carney DeBord, Eileen Reading, Marge Redmond.
Librarian: Joy He, Public Services Librarian
Proposal Overview
This proposal describes a 4-tiered project to promote information literacy throughout the physical education major. It will be created by physical education faculty and staff collaboratively with Joy He, library liaison to the Physical Education department. The reconstructed program will embed and support strong information literacy components within the current course pedagogies. It will include instruction in the classroom and class tasks, some of which will be supported by Web-based examples and tutorials, and sessions in the library and computer lab. These courses and the information literacy initiatives will also be supported by E-Res, the web-based course support recently purchased by CONSORT.
The primary focus of the proposal is to create tasks that allow students to actively engage in the course content using emerging and newly developed information literacy skills. These tasks will address issues such as understanding the different types of health, physical education, sport performance, or rehabilitative resources available, how to find various kinds of information, and how to evaluate the information that is found. Further, several of the courses will guide students to critically analyze related course content by creating a written and verbal presentation that convincingly documents sides of an issue and supports an argument for action. The presentation tasks are more terminal projects and will be created through a series of smaller tasks designed to give students feedback and guidance on the process of researching and communicating their findings in a meaningful way. These will occur later in the student's career in the physical education major. A further purpose of this proposed project is to model good, dynamic information literacy based education to future professionals so they will have templates in their minds of what good instruction of this content should look like. A final purpose is to create a fun, dynamic, challenging courses that are composed of a synchronous weave of information literacy and content concepts specific to our discipline.
While this grant is proposed for Physical Education major courses, we hope to make the information literacy skill support materials created for these courses available to all physical education faculty and students via links on our departmental WWW pages. Further, all materials, links, strategies, and tasks supporting the information literacy project within the health class will be created as support pages on a virtual physical education information literacy course on E-Res. In this way, once the information literacy project is over the results will continue to exist and be amended to encourage continued information literacy skill development within the physical education and health curriculum.
The following is a description of the envisioned information literacy tiers:
Tier 1: Activity courses required of majors (for example: PE 0033 (
Applied Principles of Physical Training), PE 0138 & 0139 (Beginning and
Intermediate Play Fitness), and aquatics classes (scuba, beginning swimming,
triathlon training). These courses would be used to familiarize students with
E-Res usage and WWW-based resources that are content specific to the course and
building blocks for the discipline. The focus would be on how to use different
types of Web search tools to find information and how to evaluate the
reliability of these content specific sources.
Tier 2: Introductory Academic Courses (PE 114 - Personal Health & Fitness, PE 231 - History, Philosophy, and Principles of Physical Education). The information literacy issues addressed at this tier would be: extended use of E-Res (discussion groups, links, assignments, lecture support, information literacy support), initial skill at locating different types of resources (research based journals, text, books, or on-line resources), evaluating resource reliability, and appropriately citing these resources appropriately. Students will also learn to develop thesis statements, practice researching a topic and writing papers to document learning and understanding the content and information literacy issues associated with it.
Tier 3: Physical Education upper division courses (PE 345 -Kinesiology, PE 352 - Motor Learning, PE 363 - Mental Aspects of Sport, PE 365 - Exercise Physiology, PE 367 - Rhythm and Movement). Information literacy issues addressed on this tier are: continued use of E-Res applications, application and critique of discipline specific hard copy and online resources, ability to transfer knowledge into original questions to support further research, and ability to communicate these findings in a verbal and written form.
Tier 4: Senior Seminar - Information literacy issues included at this tier include the use all of the information literacy skills and content specific knowledge to create thoughtful and thorough critiques and presentations of different disciplinary issues.
Timeline for the Project
Phase 1 -Spring 2001
Phase 2 - Summer 2001
Phase 3 - Fall 2001
Phase 4 - Early and Late Fall 2001
Phase 5 - End of fall semester