Leigh Estabrook
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, Illinois
Phone: 217-333-3281
E-mail: leighe@uiuc.edu

Educating for Cognitive Flexibility in LIS Education

GENERAL SESSION I: Toward the New Information Profession,
Wednesday, February 12, 1997, 11:15am - 12:30pm

This paper considers the challenges to educating LIS students for a profession in which the boundaries are increasingly fluid and the situations they will face are unpredictable. Drawing on the work of Rand Spiro, University of Illinois, the paper examines the concept of cognitive flexibility, the ability to apply prior knowledge to new situations and different contexts, as it applies to the design of LIS education

The author then considers current developments within the education academy that may both enhance and impede our schools' abilities to incorporate these ideas into curricular design. The paper argues that enrollment pressures, common modes of distance education and time demands of technology may work against our helping create cognitively flexible graduates. At the same time, new uses of internships and development of hypertext and other computer-supported curricular materials may enhance that teaching.

The paper concludes with two examples of teaching directed toward increasing the cognitive flexibility of LIS students and suggests the development of a consortium for case studies to develop materials for use across our U.S. LIS curricula.

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