Lead Student Lesson Plan
L08: Information Literacy & Academic Resources
Objectives
By the end of the gathering, students will have learned:


How to effectively find and use information.
How to use and become an academic learning resource (i.e. using and being a tutor).
Student Preparation
Students were asked to prepare for gathering by completing specific activities and/or pondering
certain questions. Please refer to the gathering instructions in this week’s unit or lesson in the
course.
Lesson Outline
OPENING
Announcements,
Hymn, and Prayer
(10 minutes)
Announcements
Opening
Devotional
Lead Student to the Whole Class
(5 minutes)
Hook activity
(10 minutes)
Opening Hymn: #143, “Let the Holy Spirit Guide,” Verses 1-2
Opening Prayer: By Invitation
Choose one verse of scripture that has meaning to you or choose a verse
you liked from the Scripture Study assignment in this week’s lesson. Read it
out loud to your classmates. Then, tell them why you chose that verse of
scripture.
Lead Student to the Whole Class
Pretend you are preparing to make a large purchase. (You can choose an
item to buy and provide a description or bring a picture of the item to make
this discussion more realistic.) You should refer to the following three
sources to research the item before making your purchase:

Read a written review on the Internet by someone who already owns the
item you are interested in buying.


Read a written review in a well-respected national magazine that
performs their own product testing.
Speak to an informed friend or neighbor.
Each of these sources provides you with pertinent information.
Discuss the value of each source of information and the type of information
provided. Why is your source important when making a decision?
Scholarly
Information
(10 minutes)
Small Groups
Read the following quote from Elder Henry B. Eyring, “ … what you have
learned to date won’t be sufficient for the future. Your hope and mine is that
you have learned how to learn. That gift will turn out to be priceless … you
only really learn a principle by using it over and over again” (“Learning How
to Learn,” BYU–Idaho commencement address, 26 Apr 2003).
A big part of learning how to learn is learning how to gather useful
information. Divide students into groups of about 3–5 students and ask
them to discuss the following questions:
 What are the different types of resources we can access for
information?
 What makes some resources better than others?
Determining how
to gather
scholarly
information
PREPARATION: Bring four different books to class that will be used in the
following activity.
(20 minutes)
Briefly review Boolean terms (and/or), truncation (library as opposed to lib*),
and evaluating a source by examining the author’s credibility, the target
audience, age of the publication, and cited references.
Lead Student to the Whole Class
Some valuable questions you could ask while reviewing these four principles
are:




Why does it matter what credentials the author has?
Why would works written by a scholar, for other scholars to read, be
valuable for our own research? (Because it includes all the available
information, and is not diluted to speak to a non-scholarly audience.)
What are some topics in which the age of the information may not
matter; what are some where it is essential to be up to date?
Does the source include cited references?
Small Groups
Break students into four groups. Give a book to each group and ask them to
determine its scholarly status. When each small group is finished, one
student from each group will present their findings to the entire group.
Using tutor
services
Lead Student to the Whole Class
Tutors can be a valuable educational resource. President Hinckley said, “In
revelation, the Lord has mandated that this people get all the education they
can. He has been very clear about this” (“Rise Up, O Men of God,” Ensign, Nov
2006, 59–61).
(8 minutes)
Share, or have another student share, a good experience using a tutor in the
past. Include both the short-term benefits and long-term effects of using a
tutor. (For example, what assistance did you receive in the short-term and
how were your overall study skills improved?)
Ask the question: What are some qualities you look for in a tutor?

Becoming a tutor
Lead Student to the Whole Class
(10 minutes)
Read the following quote from President Thomas S. Monson, “That which a
man willingly shares, he keeps. That which he selfishly keeps, he loses.”
(Preach My Gospel, pg. 198).
The students will write down academic subjects they feel they would be able
to tutor. Then, they will also write what teaching qualities they would like to
further develop to become a better tutor.
Discuss aloud the benefits that would come from being a tutor.
Guessing the
Meaning from
Context
Whole Class and Pairs
(20 minutes)
You will discuss the “guessing the meaning from context” skill and then read
a paragraph to the class. Practice reading out loud before the gathering. You
will give the students a worksheet to complete. You will need to print
the Vocabulary in Context worksheets (below) to take with you to the
gathering.
Ask the class the following discussion questions:
1. When reading, what do you do when you come to a word that you
don’t know?
2. Do you find that you can figure out the meaning of the reading
without looking up the word? Choose the category that applies:
All of the time
 Most of the time
 Some of the time
 Never
3. What do you feel are the best ways of dealing with unknown words?

After the students answer the questions, read the following paragraph.
Making an Educated Guess
Students know much more than they think they know; the term for this is
“passive knowledge.” Passive knowledge means that students understand,
from their own experience, the ideas of what they are reading, but do not
know all of the words in English. If students can make a guess, the chances
are that they will get it right most often. If you put the students into pairs or
small groups, it is more likely that, with their combined passive knowledge,
they will get most of the answers right. This is important for students
because then their confidence (their belief in themselves) in their own
abilities increases. A student’s confidence is raised and that is half the battle
in learning to speak a foreign language.
4. Divide the class into pairs and the pairs will do the “Vocabulary in
Context” worksheet.
5. After the students have completed the worksheet, ask different pairs
to share their answers. Then, the whole group will say whether they
have the same answers or not.
6. Share the correct answers with the entire group. The correct answers
are: 1. d, 2. c, 3. c, 4. b, 5. b
CLOSING
Conclusion
(2 minutes)
Lead Student to the Whole Class
Prayer
(2 minutes)
Closing Prayer: By Invitation
Bear your personal testimony of at least one of the concepts discussed at
tonight’s gathering.
Note
Please download and print a copy of these instructions to use as a reference during Thursday’s
Pathway gathering.
If there are any questions or concerns, please call or text or email your Pathway missionaries.
Worksheet: Vocabulary in Context
Read the sentences below and guess the meaning of the bold word. Use the context to help you.
1. The lion’s roar could be heard in villages far away.
a.
b.
c.
d.
food a lion eats
dream
ear
the sound a lion makes
2. José has so many friends because he is a gregarious person.
a.
b.
c.
d.
shy
quiet
outgoing
rude
3. My absent-minded boss loses his keys, his pens, and his pencils almost every day!
a.
b.
c.
d.
hateful
intelligent
doesn’t pay attention
trustworthy
4. The thought of eating a snake is abhorrent to most people.
a.
b.
c.
d.
fun
horrible
delicious
sweet
5. Table salt is finer than rock salt.
a.
b.
c.
d.
better quality
made of smaller particles
cleaner
more smelly
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