(2 Nov 2021) Gale, part of Cengage Group, is helping faculty and students enhance their digital literacy and critical thinking skills. The company has launched its new Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources. Built with the student researcher in mind, the Learning Centers orient new users to the content and topics available in a digital archive, spark inspiration for new research topics and provide guidance and best practices for searching, browsing, citing and reusing primary sources. The Learning Centers also provide faculty and librarians with an invaluable, all-in-one instructional tool that helps learners get acclimated with a primary source database, saving educators’ time creating teaching material. Now students can develop their digital literacy and critical thinking skills through practical examples and advanced search strategies, enabling better learning outcomes.
With fake news at an all-time high, the Learning Centers comes at a time when digital literacy has never been more critical. Stanford researchers found that 98% of high school students are unprepared to judge the credibility of information on the internet. The new Learning Centers provide equity of access into digital scholarship to build digital literacy skills that prepare students for their post-college careers.
“Exploring primary sources can be an empowering experience for the student researcher, allowing for open-ended inquiry and the development of critical thinking skills,” said Seth Cayley, vice president of global academic product at Gale. “The Learning Centers will help set students on that path, as well as provide instructors with tools to help tailor classes that are engaging with digital archives for the first time.”
The Learning Centers are organized in four key workflow steps: 1). Conceptualize 2). Find 3). Read 4). Use. The steps are based on the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and Society of American Archivists (SAA) Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy learning objectives. Each workflow section features detailed instructional content that’s engaging and accessible. The content in each individual Learning Center is tailored to the digital archive it supports. Content includes topic overviews, sample searches, essays by subject experts, step-by-step search strategies, case studies and discussion questions to encourage further exploration.
Gale Primary Sources that currently have Learning Centers enabled include:
- Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896–2016
- International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887–2013
- The Mirror Historical Archive, 1903–2000
- Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890–1970
- Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992
- Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II
- Religions of America
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection
- The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855–2016
- The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2019
For institutions who already have access to these archives, the Learning Centers are automatically enabled at no additional charge. More Learning Centers will be enabled in phases over time into all Gale Primary Sources.
For more information on the Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources, visit: gale.com/academic/learning-centers.
The original press release is here.