Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students Make the Most of Scholarly Articles

University students in a Public Relations program were struggling to connect the scholarly literature with their professional practice. A collaboration between a librarian and an instructor in the program led to the development of a class on reading scholarly articles within a research methods course. To better understand the student experience, and the possible impact of that class, the collaborators conducted a survey of students who had participated in the class a year later in another course that required them to use academic materials. The literature review indicates that our students are not the only ones who face challenges in this area, and provides some background both for the class we developed and for the results from the survey.