Charles W Gunnels IV

In 2015, Florida Gulf Coast University launched a five-year campus-wide initiative that aimed to improve students' skills in writing, critical thinking, and information literacy through the creation of scholarly products. This initiative, dubbed FGCUScholars: Think • Write • Discover, fulfills a requirement of the regional accrediting body for the university as FGCU's 2015-2020 Quality Enhancement Plan, but more importantly this effort presents an opportunity to create real and useful impact on students' ability to succeed during their academic tenure and in their lives after college. While FGCUScholars encourages culture changes across the university, this initiative has also proven to be the intervention that the FGCU library needed to reexamine and reinvigorate its information literacy program. Results of the Year-0 baseline assessment have given FGCU librarians and faculty new insights into students' information literacy abilities, including areas in which they are most and least proficient and how they develop these skills over time at the university. Not only has FGCUScholars provided the library and university community with meaningful data on student achievement and performance in information literacy, but the initiative has also renewed interest amongst non-library faculty in information literacy as necessary for the development of scholars and lifelong learners amongst students in all disciplines. The library's ability to participate and benefit from this campus-wide initiative emerged from proactive engagement, integrating library goals into university goals, and rolling specific interests (i.e., information literacy) into topics with broader appeal, all of which began years in advance of the FGCUScholars.