Early Information Literacy Experience Matters to Self-Efficacy and Performance Outcomes in Teacher Education

Abstract

A teacher educator and college librarian collaboratively designed and taught teacher education workshops about finding and evaluating what works in teaching. This study investigated interactions of self-efficacy for information literacy, self-efficacy for solving problems with evidence-based practices, skills of searching for and citing sources, verbalized reasoning, and writing about evidence-based teaching practices. Students completed pre- and postsurveys, recorded screencasts while researching, and submitted papers regarding the effectiveness of one teaching practice. Students made significant self-efficacy gains in response to training. Furthermore, results demonstrated that early experience with information literacy and the self-efficacy that develops is a strong predictor of self-efficacy and performance later in the discipline-specific task to find, evaluate, and write about evidence-based teaching practices.