Because community college students bring a wide range of skills and a diverse set of cultural backgrounds to their academic environment, teaching about research, intellectual property, and scholarly writing are essential components of an education preparing them to join the workforce or continue their academic studies at an internationally competitive level. The distribution of the community college students’ computer, library research, laboratory or field research, critical thinking, mathematics and writing skills indicates a need to develop stronger information literacy and research process skills in this population. For the study, via instruction using a botanical database as a model, a typical college level biology class assignment was designed to include the application of information literacy competencies and objectives in the context of science learning. In addition to course content learning objectives, students considered and worked with activities related to intellectual property, citation, subject specific database searching, online subscription database navigation, experimental design and scientific writing at a scholarly level. An analysis of the scholarly writing among first-year laboratory science/biology students at the community college, both before and after library research instruction, is presented. The botanical database, and online scholarly journal access using subscription databases proved to be useful tools for developing student research abilities including selection, evaluation, and application of content for a stated application. This project was supported in part by a grant from J. S. Shipman.

Key words: botany, community college, competencies, information literacy, research process, science education