“Getting Psyched” About Information Literacy: A Successful Faculty-Librarian Collaboration for Educational Psychology and Counseling

Abstract

SUMMARY Librarians and Educational Psychology and Counseling faculty in the Michael D. Eisner College of Education at California State University Northridge are collaborating to design instructional sessions with assessment components to support newly adopted department information competence goals and curricula. This current collaboration between librarians, faculty, and departmental administrators offers a model for incorporating information literacy instruction into pre-service programs for future educators, counselors, and administrators. Through funding from a California State University Information Competence grant, faculty have identified three information literacy competency skill sets (Basic, Research, and Professional/Field competencies) that now comprise a part of the department's new learning outcomes for graduate students in Educational Psychology and Counseling, making information competence a required learning outcome for the degree program. A description of the dynamic faculty-librarian collaborative process that integrated information literacy instruction and assessment into Educational Psychology 602 (Research Principles) is provided, along with information about the grant and interactions that fostered the development and implementation of this successful graduate student information literacy program.