Impact of Assignment Prompt on Information Literacy Performance in First-year Student Writing

This study attempts to quantify the impact of assignment prompts and phased assignment sequencing on first-year student work; specifically, whether more fully developed and “scaffolded” assignment prompts produced better Information Literacy (IL) in student papers (n = 520). The examination of assignment prompts in relation to student IL rubric scores would seem to indicate that conventional wisdom on developing assignment prompts might not have an impact on IL performance.