Chapter 4: Bottlenecks of Information Literacy

Abstract

In recent years academic librarians have expressed great interest in the places where students get “stuck” in their learning process, such as threshold concepts and bottlenecks. By identifying where students struggle, librarians, like many college educators, can develop more effective pedagogical approaches both to their individual instruction and to collaborative teaching with disciplinary faculty.

Decoding the Disciplines (hereafter Decoding) is a model for instructional design that begins with identifying these stuck places, the “bottlenecks of learning.” The Decoding framework offers a process for teachers to address these bottlenecks through modeling, opportunities for student practice and instructor feedback, and assessment. While Decoding is most often discussed in relation to student learning, it is also a powerful model for fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration among educators.

Decoding the Disciplines is a theory of pedagogy, while bottlenecks are a theory of difficulty that guide Decoding. As a theory of difficulty, the bottlenecks point educators to where the critical assumptions and mental moves in their discipline are not being made clear and where it would be worthwhile to focus their efforts. As a pedagogical theory, Decoding the Disciplines provides a solid framework to get students through the difficulties. We surveyed instruction librarians about their perceptions of the “bottlenecks of information literacy,” which revealed that most pervasive bottleneck of information literacy for students, faculty, and librarians may be the misconception that information seeking is a simple mechanical process of source retrieval, rather than an inquiry-driven, analytical process. In this chapter we discuss how Decoding can help educators develop effective responses to this bottleneck, as well as how Decoding and the Framework can work complementarily to cultivate cross-disciplinary teaching partnerships that address such bottlenecks.