Mary Ellen Edwards

Critical Thinking or Learning to Copy Information Correctly: an Analysis Mary Ellen Edwards

Critical thinking has been a major goal of higher education institutions and academic libraries since their formation. Critical thinking is a way of processing and using information. Academic libraries as the traditional storage facilities for preserving resources and places for providing access to information have been considered information centers for academics. Throughout the 20th century, academic librarians have taught bibliographic instruction sessions; the Information Age brought about new formats of information. Librarians therefore try to instill in students information literacy skills and critical thinking skills. One of the developmental models of critical thinking, developed by Kuhn (1999); looks at critical thinking as being made up of metacognitive, metastrategic, and epistemological meta-knowing. Critical thinking is involved in information literacy, but the key is moving beyond just learning how to locate information. Can students enter an academic library and critically evaluate the information resources? Are librarians fulfilling the role of teaching information literacy along with the required critical thinking skills for true information literacy?