"My Mom Recommended It to Me": Understanding Homeschoolers' Information Practices

A traditional motivation was to educate based on values, beliefs, and pedagogies that were different from what traditional American public schools offered.3 However, there are other, more diversified reasons to homeschool, including ensuring a learning environment protected from violence, drugs, and negative peer pressure; meeting the unique educational or disability needs of each child; offering flexibility and freedom; providing racial protection and racially focused education; reducing distractions; and supporting focused learning.4 Despite the overall small population of homeschoolers in the United States, the population of homeschoolers has grown rapidly due to school closures since the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic in While research on homeschoolers in Library and Information Science (LIS) is scant, these very few studies showed that homeschoolers were traditionally strong supporters and users of their local public library, although usage was to varying degrees.6 In a recent study, Sarah Pannone indicated homeschoolers' need and desire for more programs and curriculum-related resources.7 One of these much-needed programs for homeschoolers is information literacy programs in public libraries, as researchers have shown young people today have inadequate skills to evaluate information on the Web and think critically about their information environment.8 Information literacy is essential in learning in all kinds of educational settings and workplaces, as it involves high-order critical thinking skills and meta-competency, which, according to Annemaree Lloyd, is knowing the strategies of interacting with information effectively in specific contexts.9 Information literacy skills also help people identify fake news.10 The need for in-depth information literacy education is increasingly more urgent in today's information environment. "13 While this way of defining information literacy can be instrumental for educators and practitioners,14 researchers in LIS have challenged this skills-based model of information literacy.15 Prior research showed that when information literacy instructions were focused on these decontextualized skills-such as finding information from a set of specific information sources and using sources in a preferred order-students were not prepared to handle the complex information environment in out-of-school settings and everyday life.16 Students might experience challenges, such as synthesizing information, evaluating sources, u