AI tools are changing what information literacy instruction needs to look like.
Teaching information literacy used to mean teaching students how to search.
Now, increasingly, it means teaching them how to *question what AI tools hand them*.
A few practical approaches are working well in instruction sessions:
*Source verification with Perplexity* Ask students a research question, then trace every citation in the AI response back to the original source. It quickly shows that a citation attached to an AI answer does not automatically make the information reliable.
*Citation context with Scite.ai* Show students what happened to a paper after it was published. Did later research support it, contradict it, or simply mention it? Seeing the citation context makes an otherwise abstract concept much easier to understand.
*Evidence synthesis with Consensus* This is useful for showing the difference between “AI summarised some papers” and “this is what a body of peer-reviewed research suggests.” Students can inspect the underlying sources rather than simply accepting the summary.
*Prompt literacy* Writing a precise AI prompt has more in common with constructing a good database search than many students realise. Defining the question, setting boundaries and specifying the evidence required are research skills in both settings.
*AI detection tools need scrutiny too* Students should understand that AI detectors can produce false positives and should not be treated as unquestionable evidence. Teaching healthy scepticism towards detection tools is part of information literacy too.
*Compare AI with library databases* Give students the same research question and ask them to search it using a library database and an AI tool. Then compare the results. What did each find? What did each miss? Which sources were easier to verify?
*Documenting AI use* Encouraging students to record when and how they used AI during their research builds a useful habit of transparency before formal disclosure or citation requirements become an issue.
None of this replaces the foundations of information literacy.
The basic skill remains the same:
*Evaluate the source. Question the evidence. Make a reasoned judgement.*
The difference is that students now have another layer to evaluate — the AI system sitting between them and the information.
*What is working in your own information literacy instruction sessions?*