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In this article Debbie Abilock and Connie Williams apply the processes used by a food testing organization that strives to develop absolutely the best recipes for popular dishes, testing each recipe until they arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most fool-proof recipe as their inspiration to develop a teaching recipe that would consistently engage students in open-minded inquiry, an infographic. An infographic is a claim expressed through visual metaphor, conveying the creator's fresh understanding of relationships, expressed through a judicious selection and arrangement of visuals, evidence, and text acquired during inquiry research within a discipline. They describe a process in which students develop a research question within a domain, investigate a variety of claims and evidence wherever they lead, play with connections and assess contradictions, and wonder about the possible significance of their findings. Abilock and Williams are sure that cultivating an open-minded disposition and thoughtful inquiry strategies will benefit students' civic literacy and creativity, and that students' thinking about the interaction between a complex text and images in the service of a purpose and audience will improve their reading comprehension.

Like a printed text, an architectural blueprint, a mathematical equation, or a musical score, a visual image is its own language. Visual literacy has three components: (1) learning; (2) thinking; and (3) communicating. A "literate" person is able to decipher the basic code and syntax, interpret the signs and symbols, correctly apply terms from an academic discipline or field of study, understand how things fit together, and do appropriate work. Visual "information" literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and use visual information. Just as reader response theory conceptualizes textual literacy in terms of an interaction between the text and the reader, a theory of visual literacy ought to take into account the transaction of the viewer with the image. To represent that relationship of the subject, the medium, the photographer, and the context with the viewer, the author modified the classical rhetorical stance to model the reading of a photograph. In this article, the author describes how to teach visual information literacy using documentary photographs. (Contains 1 table.)

Professionally, school librarians are faced with an explosion of choices--search engines, online catalogs, media types, subscription databases, and Web tools--all requiring scrutiny, evaluation, and selection. In turn, this support "stuff" forms a basis for making additional choices about how and what they teach and what they assess. Whereas once school librarians would ask "whether" evaluating students was appropriate to their role, now many are intent on learning "how" and "which" evaluations and assessments to use, as well as "what" to assess and "why", and feeling less satisfied with their final decisions. In recent years, in the face of pressure to document the value of the library's program to faculty and administration, to gain credibility with students and parents, and even to improve the attractiveness of graduating seniors in a highly competitive admissions process, some school librarians have chosen standardized information literacy evaluation instruments. They turn to these tests to help them systematically evaluate student growth, improve the library's program, and compare their students' performance against that of other students in similar institutions. Given the difficulty that people encountered when selecting from an array of jams, school librarians are also wondering how they will ever be able to choose from a cornucopia of evaluation tools. Whether librarians choose formative (ongoing) or summative (end-state) assessments, the author asserts that the key is backwards design (Wiggins and McTighe 2005), in which the type of assessment is matched to the kind of knowledge being assessed. Here, the author stresses that in certain cases, school librarians must decide to satisfice because "the goal of maximizing . . . can make people miserable--especially in a world that insists on providing an overwhelming number of choices, both trivial and not so trivial" (Schwartz 2004). In choosing assessments, the author suggests to read widely beyond the professional literature and experiment. Then pick only a few goals and match the assessment to them.

Includes 19 articles that address issues related to library skills and Canadian school libraries. Topics include information literacy; inquiry learning; critical thinking and electronic research; collaborative inquiry; information skills and the Big 6 approach to problem solving; student use of online databases; library skills; Internet accuracy; and Web sources. (LRW)