Incorporation of Cross-Disciplinary Teaching and a Wiki Research Project to Engage Undergraduate Students’ to Develop Information Literacy, Critical Thinking, and Communication Skills

Abstract

A Wiki research project was created in the Functional Foods for Health (FST/HNFE 2544) as an instructional tool and assignment for improving undergraduate students’ proficiency in evaluating appropriate information sources for rapidly evolving science and research. The project design targeted improving students’ information literacy skills including how students obtain, discern relevant and reliable scientific information from propaganda, critique information, and communicate scientific language. In addition to the Wiki research project, guest experts in political science, statistics, and human nutrition discussed their expertise as related to functional foods to the class. A reviewer rubric was developed to evaluate and compare Wiki project assignments from the Fall 2013 course (experimental; cross-disciplinary topics) with the previous course offering (control, Fall 2012; no cross-disciplinary lectures) to establish a directionality of academic performance change between the 2 course years. Eight rubric criteria were categorized as critical thinking, cross-discipline, and communication (scoring: 1 [lowest] and 3 [highest]). We observed that the critical thinking criteria (n = 5) had improved scores (P < 0.05) from Fall 2012 to Fall 2013. Cross-discipline criteria (n = 2) had one categorical improvement (P < 0.05) but one category did not have improved scores (P > 0.05) in the experimental year (Fall 2013) despite the multidiscipline guest lectures. This educational intervention provides value to instructors for incorporating critical thinking, information literacy, and communication assignments that encourage skill development and practice to improve student proficiency. Students felt their skills and knowledge increased based on this project. This manuscript provides assignment guidelines and teaching techniques used to assist in development and improvement of students’ critical thinking skills, communication, and information literacy.