Being information literate hinges on, among other skills, the ability to locate, access, evaluate, and use information effectively and ethically.1 As the backbone of the research process, it improves the quality and efficacy of students’ research. To achieve information literacy, librarians and educators must develop lesson plans and assignments that develop the critical thinking skills necessary to guide learners through tortuous and daunting information seeking processes. According to Whitmire, “The combination of a new generation of computer–literate undergraduates and the vast amount of information available by way of computers and electronic resources has increased the necessity for the development of critical thinking skills.”2 Pascarella and Terenzini note the interrelatedness of the two, writing that such “cognitive competencies” as information literacy and critical thinking together permit individuals to, among many other things, “process and utilize new information” and “evaluate arguments and claims critically.”3 Generally, students often overestimate their own research abilities because they equate their knowledge of computers and technology with information literacy and critical thinking. In order to address this problem, the design of any assignment used as a teaching strategy and assessment tool must reinforce information literacy skills. And since students often perceive themselves as information literate and not merely technologically savvy (based on the simplest notions of access), this assignment also needs to challenge their critical thinking abilities, so that they themselves come to understand the vast difference between the two competencies. This article explains efforts to embed such critical thinking and information literacy skills into the design of a course assignment for college students. Critical thinking is defined as “the intellectual and mental process by which an individual successfully conceptualizes, analyzes, synthesizes, evaluates, and/or applies information in order to formulate judgments, 2 conclusions, or answers.”4 While information literacy focuses more on navigating oceans of information, critical thinking concentrates on developing independent reasoning about that information. But just as information literacy must be accompanied by critical thinking in order to be meaningful, critical thinking abilities are dependent on information literacy skills. Alluding to the 1945 Harvard report “General Education in a Free Society,” Albitz argues those authors may have been shortsighted, believing that “effective [critical] thinkers could do the following three activities: communicate, make relevant judgments, and discriminate among values.”5 Ward addresses this shortsightedness, observing that “critical thinking is not always sufficient in itself as a strategy for navigating through the information universe.”6 What the two argue is that only by meshing, in one operation, the gears of critical thinking with those of information literacy, can a modern researcher produce a satisfactory result. We therefore designed an assignment to measure and encourage both information literacy and critical thinking in our students.