But this week, October 26-30, is my own personal Chemistry Week. This week, I will teach 4 two hour information literacy sessions to organic chemistry students, provide the lesson plan and all in-class content for three additional sections of organic chemistry, and teach a session on evaluating resources and expanding your literature search to senior seminar students.
I recently gave a presentation about what types of things we talk about at the various levels. I enjoy teaching theses sessions, and I believe they are useful to the students.
This year I’m trying to focus on assessment – are the students actually learning what we want them to learn? Do they already know it before our session? Do they think the sessions are useful?
Each student in the organic lab is completing a brief follow up survey, so we can get a sense of how useful the session is and whether the students actually learned what we wanted to teach them. For this follow up survey we are asking a few questions about learning outcomes, plus a couple of attitudinal questions.
In the upper level seminar, students are filling out a brief survey about their previous research experiences, to give me a sense of their comfort level with certain resources (Scopus or SciFinder) and to allow them the opportunity to ask any research questions prior to our session (I’m not anticipating that they will have many). While students are normally not very good at assessing their own weaknesses, this will give us some information about student attitudes toward research.
I’m excited about seeing the result – hopefully they will allow the chemistry faculty and I to continue to improve the way we teach about the chemical literature and literature searching.
the Undergraduate Science Librarian 