Deceived, Confused, or Peer Reviewed? Critical Information Literacy in a First-Year Neuroscience Course

Information literacy skills are necessary to parse today's complex information landscape full of general audience, scholarly, and deceptive sources. For a student new to college and unfamiliar with publishing norms in the discipline, it can be difficult to identify and select from among the range of sources that electronic searches return - especially on Google or Google Scholar, which most students use regularly at the pre-college level. Centering information literacy as a course objective invites students into the scholarly conversation at a deeper level than typical one-off database searching sessions. Further, framing this objective through the lens of critical information literacy engages students in considering how structures of power and privilege direct the production, dissemination, and consumption of scientific research products, including deceptive sources. We, an information literacy librarian and a neuroscience faculty member at a small liberal arts college, have collaborated in developing critical information literacy curricula embedded within an introductory neuroscience course. Here we will briefly describe our motivation, process, and outcomes, and lessons learned from this effort.