Home - For Faculty and Teaching Assistants: Exercises to Help Your Students Build Library Research Skills

Information Literacy Competencies

To thrive in today's complex information environment, students need to know where to look for information, how to evaluate the quality of an information source, and how to apply the information to their work. This is the basis of "information literacy" competency.

Did you know that information literacy figures prominently in Middle States Commission for Higher Education general education requirements?

Middle States, the American Association for Higher Education and many other educational organizations worldwide recognize the information literacy competency standards established by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

Other Exercise Ideas

Customized Exercises

You are welcome to contact an NYU Librarian and work together to develop a customized library exercise/assignment.

Purpose of this guide

This guide is for faculty and graduate teaching assistants. It offers exercises that you can assign to students to help them develop library research skills. With these tools, you can help your students learn how to develop a manageable topic; where to look for and how to select relevant, high quality sources; how to organize research results and properly cite sources.

How to use the exercises:

Download any exercise (student version), then upload to Blackboard or email it to your students.
Feel free to customize an exercise to more closely meet your needs or relate to your subject area.
Most exercises have an instructor version to provide an example of what a well completed exercise would look like.