Building a bridge between skills and thresholds

Using Bloom’s to develop an information literacy taxonomy

Abstract

Within the past decade, there has been a shift in how our guiding professional documents conceptualise information literacy (IL) — evolving from a skills-based conceptualisation to one emphasising ways of thinking and knowing. This has been both productive and disruptive. Our professional documentation does not provide a framework for making this shift or for scaffolding learning to develop complex and sophisticated ways of thinking and knowing. In this study, we apply Bloom’s revised taxonomy for educational objectives to instructor descriptions of IL (n=51) to develop a draft taxonomy that attempts to build a bridge between these two conceptualisations. The data was drawn from a survey that was administered to instructors and instructional support staff immediately preceding their participation in a multi-day teaching professional development workshop related to IL. We believe that this model has implications for how we approach the development of learners’ IL with intentionality, both in collaboration with faculty and for our own teaching practices as librarians.