(405b) Lifelong Learning Training through Sustainability-Focused Problems Using Information Literacy

Lifelong learning is a difficult topic to convey to students as it involves training them in a process and not in a specific and well defined topical knowledge content area. One way to think of lifelong learning is to break it up into the context of activities that need to occur in order for self-learning to be undertaken. First, learners must identify a topic that they are interested in that is relevant to their needs. They must then identify the limits of their current knowledge within the framework of what needs to be learned. Once this groundwork has been established, the learners must then identify the information gaps they have and the methods they will use through information literacy to seek out and validate the available information. The found data will then need to be used to address the original topical needs before the learner can reach understanding.

In this pedagogical work, information literacy has been combined with sustainability topics in order to train students how to independently learn information in parallel with topics in a required class. Sustainability issues were selected due to the high student interest in these topics and their immediacy in the public media. Stories were collected from prominent news sources and were discussed briefly at the beginning of each class meeting for the 100 person sophomore class. These stories were then reintroduced in the context of homework problems that were specifically constructed around the topical area, often in a thematic way where the same newspaper article may be used for three different chapters of material. The construction of the problems guided students to use information literacy techniques that were introduced in one lecture to obtain and evaluate information as they used it in order to solve the problems. As the semester progressed, students were required to obtain more peer reviewed information and to compare public media data with peer reviewed data in addition to comparing to their computed results.

An algorithm for creating information literacy-based problems to foster lifelong learning is presented. Additionally, all prior materials constructed for a materials and energy balances course, with complete solutions, is available by request so that faculty do not need to construct their own problems. Key to this algorithm is an emphasis on learning styles. Specific students seem to learn most efficiently from either visual or textual or audio sources, perhaps in a unique mixture different from other students. For this reason, an attempt was made to present focused problems in a multitude of forms so the students may learn in different congruent contexts.

Availability of course materials is of paramount concern to both student and teacher. All materials presented to students at any point during the semester should be easily accessible to them, independent of location and time. Explanations, visual aids, problems and solutions were placed in an online database accessible to both students and teacher. This expanded the students' abilities to learn by allowing them to watch and listen during lectures instead of taking notes, and to stay current in spite of absences. Any references to outside data sources were carefully cited and compiled, with concern to the future availability of archived web resources.

Students responded positively to the materials over a three year span, both quantitatively and with anecdotal evidence. Student scores on exams rose about 10% after the homework problems were introduced while homework scores decreased slightly. It was not unusual, even for non-major students who had taken the class to contact the professor in subsequent semesters to suggest problems that they had thought of in the context of the class. For example, one non-major student emailed a newspaper article from a media story where a doctor commented that people living in deserts had to drink a certain amount of water per day due to that lost during respiration. The student went on to suggest that a problem be constructed around the ideal gas law, Raoult's Law, and mole balances. Students also anecdotally commented that while the homework was very challenging, they appreciated the skills they obtained during the semester.