Starting with WHY: Communicating Relevance in Information Literacy Instruction

Students are rational actors who make decisions about how to engage with information and with us. By explicitly highlighting the relevance of what we’re teaching, prior to teaching it, we can directly address students’ information literacy assumptions and misconceptions and make instruction truly impactful. If we fail to communicate the relevance of what we’re teaching, we risk undermining our instructional mission. In this presentation, we will tackle some common student assumptions about the information landscape and share how we have addressed them in order to meet students where they are.