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Information literacy refers to a set of skills that allow its user to find appropriate resources and use them to develop, define and defend arguments. In many undergraduate programms, including biology and STEM related fields, students are expected to utilise these skills in writing lab reports, paper analyses, and in developing testable hypotheses. Here, we describe the development of a formalised information literacy module for an introductory biology laboratory course and a rubric to measure the effectiveness of this module, including suggestions for implementation. Our data show that while short-term gains were not made using previously published IL tests, application of a tailored rubric to writing assignments did show significant improvement in the students' ability to find relevant sources, define the purpose of their work and explore that focus. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that even modest additions of formal instruction in information literacy to a course can significantly improve student gains in this area.

The house mouse is a well-established model organism, particularly for studying the genetics of complex traits. However, most studies of mice use classical inbred strains, whose genomes derive from multiple species. Relatively little is known about the distribution of genetic variation among these species or how variation among strains relates to variation in the wild. We sequenced intronic regions of five X-linked loci in large samples of wild Mus domesticus and M. musculus, and we found low levels of nucleotide diversity in both species. We compared these data to published data from short portions of six X-linked and 18 autosomal loci in wild mice. We estimate that M. domesticus and M. musculus diverged

Information literacy refers to a set of skills that allow its user to find appropriate resources and use them to develop, define and defend arguments. In many undergraduate programms, including biology and STEM related fields, students are expected to utilise these skills in writing lab reports, paper analyses, and in developing testable hypotheses. Here, we describe the development of a formalised information literacy module for an introductory biology laboratory course and a rubric to measure the effectiveness of this module, including suggestions for implementation. Our data show that while short-term gains were not made using previously published IL tests, application of a tailored rubric to writing assignments did show significant improvement in the students' ability to find relevant sources, define the purpose of their work and explore that focus. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that even modest additions of formal instruction in information literacy to a course can significantly improve student gains in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]