The TeenTech Award for Research and Information Literacy is sponsored by :
The CILIP Information Literacy Group in partnership with TeenTech is delighted to announce a new award for 2015 recognising excellence in research and information literacy. This award highlights the importance of students having highly developed research skills and the ability to critically and ethically use information to underpin their projects.
All projects entered for the 2015 Awards will be eligible and schools or libraries wishing to register for the 2015/6 Awards should register interest here: http://www.teentech.com/awards/awards-2016-expression-of-interest/
Details
All good science and technology is informed by earlier studies and previous research. One of the most famous and celebrated scientists Sir Isaac Newton famously said ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ By this he meant that his work was informed by the research of others. We expect all TeenTech projects to carry out research, in many cases using the internet, to find out how things work, to identify previous studies and to find innovative solutions for their project.
We have put together some resources to help teachers and students understand effective methods to research projects
For 11-16 year olds this award will celebrate how well young people can show that they can be truly information literate researchers as they explore their ideas to make life better, simpler or easier. Winners will have demonstrated their ability to search across a range of resources, make excellent judgments about the information they have found and put it to ethical use in their project.
This is a new award, judged across all categories in the competition.
The judges will look for projects which have drawn upon high quality information to support their work. Projects will demonstrate this by submitting a high quality annotated bibliography which shows a range of sources have been consulted. The bibliography should follow a consistent Harvard citation style and guidance will be provided.
Projects should also submit a log to record the searches they have carried out, including keywords they used and annotations for each information source chosen will include evaluative statements stating why specific sources were used in their project.
The judges of this award are all professional librarians from schools, colleges and universities and information science academics.
The CILIP Information Literacy Group will provide guidance to the projects on how to search for and evaluate science and technology information, including a list of recommended starting places for carrying out research. They will also supply a style guide for the bibliography and a template for the search log. Finally the Group will provide research and information literacy resources to support for teachers and librarians in schools.
The Information Literacy Group will offer scheduled webinars for all projects and bookable one to one research consultations for projects to help them identify suitable sources for their project, to evaluate and use the information appropriately. Contact awards@teentechevent.com for more information.
We are delighted to be part of TeenTech and support participants in gaining the excellent research and information literacy skills necessary to underpin high quality that science and technology projects.