April 2010 – the Undergraduate Science Librarian

Assessing Information Literacy Skills in First Year Students

A new open access journal, Communications in Information Literacy, recently published an article about assessing library instruction for first year students. The paper caught my eye because I’m working on some similar things here at Geneseo.

The study sought to determine if students’ information literacy skills and confidence with research improved more with a greater number of librarian-led information literacy sessions. The author used a pre-test and a post-test to examine students’ attitudes and stated behaviors. She used likert-style questions to assess students’ previous use of information sources and their confidence with various information related tasks. One group of students received the typical one-shot information literacy session in a first year writing and critical thinking class. Another group received two or three information literacy sessions over the course of the semester.

The author is very clear about outlining the challenges we all face in trying to assess information literacy instruction. Most notably, it is almost impossible to control for the wide variety of variables that have an impact on student information literacy skills:

Prior information literacy instruction in high school or other venues
Prior practice doing scholarly research
Student intelligence and creativity
Opportunity to practice skills learned in an information literacy session (and differences in the assignment requirements)
Differences in scholarship between various disciplines

Some information related to the factors listed above is relatively easy to obtain (although perhaps not so easy to quantify). Course faculty can be a source of information about assignment requirements, and will set the standards for more or less practice information literacy and research skills.

On the other hand, getting information about prior instruction and practice normally relies on students’ self reporting, which is not always accurate.

In addition to the likert-style attitudinal questions, the author analyzed student bibliographies. She looked at the different types of sources used, and whether they were available through the library or through other sources.

The latter question is challenging. Typically, a student doesn’t need to use a library database to access the full text of articles if they are on the campus network. As a result, they could easily have used one of many search engines and not even realized they were using library resources. On the other hand, use of library databases that resulted in articles requested through Interlibrary Loan would not count as library sources. We emphasize ILL at my institution, however, so perhaps it isn’t used as much at other institutions.

All of this begs the question – are the information literacy sessions we teach an effective way of teaching students research skills?

The author of this paper concludes that there is some positive benefit to the increased number of information literacy sessions, although the data seem a bit more mixed to me.

I wish that the author had actually tested students research skills. While it may be much more difficult to evaluate, student confidence does not necessarily correlate with student skills.

Julie K. Gilbert (2009). Using Assessment Data to Investigate Library Instruction for First Year Students Communications in Information Literacy, 3 (2), 181-192

undergraduate

How to Choose the “Best” Student Poster Presentations

Yesterday was SUNY Geneseo’s “GREAT Day” – a celebration of student achievement in the form of posters, presentations and performances. There were 165 poster presentations and a similar number of oral presentations and performances. Students presented research findings, class projects and original art. It was amazing – our students are really quite smart and talented!

Great Day 2010 — Geneseo Recognizing Excellence, Achievement, and Talent

Each year, the library selects a small portion of the posters to hang in the library for the following semester as an example of student work and research at Geneseo. This year, the posters will also be displayed at a “Best of GREAT Day” event for college donors and board members. The only issue is that these posters aren’t really the “Best of GREAT day.” Librarians have 2 hours to review 20 student posters each and talk to the students involved. We can’t really pick out the “best.” (Next year, I think the event will have a name change to “Selections from GREAT Day.”)

So how do I make my selections?

Step 1: Delete the word “best” from the description. Don’t worry about it.

Step 2: Talk to the students. Do they know what they are talking about? Do they know how their research fits into the grad scheme of things?

Step 3: Find the interesting things. Which posters showcase the variety of research being done? Which posters have pretty pictures of students in exotic places? Which posters have an interesting interdisciplinary appeal?

Step 4: Does the poster meet some minimum requirements for looking good? I am not particularly concerned about how pretty a poster is, but I would like to see a certain level of competence.

Step 5: Stop dithering and make a decision already! It is very difficult to narrow down my selection to just 25% of the posters presented. At some point you just have to decide.

Have a look at some of the great things our students are doing – the GREAT Day program (PDF) is online.

information literacy, undergraduate

A Different Approach to Plagiarism Prevention

First, we don’t call it “Plagiarism Prevention.” In the approach I developed with a collaborating faculty member from biology, we teach students about “Citation Best Practices.”

Most students never have instruction on what plagiarism is or how to avoid it. Library instruction about citation often focuses on creating the citation, not how to incorporate in-text citations into your document.

Wikipedian Protester. From the web comic xkcd.

The faculty member I work with decided that she would be willing to give up a bit of content time to discuss these issues with the students. One of our major goals was that we didn’t want this instruction to be punitive – we didn’t want to focus on how bad plagiarism is. Like many other plagiarism prevention strategies, we wanted to be positive and proactive.

We decided to focus on teaching students how to do citations properly – something they had probably not been taught before.

I spent some class time teaching students how to construct a proper citation, and how to tell what type of item they are citing (for example, how to tell the difference between an article or article abstract found through a Google search and a web page).

Then I discuss best practices for doing in-text citations.

First, I remind students that the articles they are using for their papers had authors – real, live people who did the experiments and wrote the papers. When they cite their sources in their paper, they can acknowledge this in the language they use.

Biologists Smith and Jones (2005) discovered that something really exciting happened.

I provide some examples of how they may use their sources in different ways when writing their paper, and provide some sample language for incorporating the citations:

Using a source as background information
Using a source as an example
Criticizing or analyzing a source
Comparing two or more sources

At the end of a brief lecture discussing some of these issues, I provide students with sample paragraphs with citations. (See a sample power point lecture and sample paragraphs.) Each paragraph uses some citations well, and others poorly. We ask students to determine what is done well and how each sample could be improved.

In our class discussion about the examples we talk about:

How often do you need to insert a citation?
Citing sources at the beginning or ending of sentences.
Use (or not) of quotations in scientific papers.
What is implied if no citation is included?
What is considered common knowledge?

Does this cover all aspects of preventing plagiarism? No. We don’t touch on a lot of details, and we don’t go into the implications of what happens if you do plagiarize. We don’t touch on cross-cultural issues of plagiarism, and we don’t go into detail about how to paraphrase or take notes so you don’t accidentally copy.

But by providing this type of instruction, we can help students write better papers, give them some strategies for avoiding accidental plagiarism, and make the connection between the term papers they are writing and the scientific literature.

Uncategorized

Teaching Summer School

About five years ago, I left a job teaching introductory geology labs (and the occasional intro class) to move into the world of librarianship. I don’t regret my move one bit – I really love my job.

But I still love geology. And this summer I may have an opportunity to immerse myself in Introductory Geology all over again. Presuming that enough students sign up, I will be teaching GSCI 100, “Our Geologic Environment,” during the first summer session here at Geneseo.

Untitled. Letchworth State Park — Some of the lovely local geology exposed at Letchworth State Park. Creative Commons licenced picture courtesy of Flickr user Linden_Tea

GSCI 100 N/Our Geologic Environment
This course is intended for non-science majors who have an interest in their physical environment. The course is designed to develop an understanding of the interaction of Earth processes, the environment, and the human population. Topics include Earth materials, natural resources, geologic hazards, environmental change, and global environmental issues.

I have been reminding myself which elements I need to include in a syllabus (What’s my office number, again? It’s the second cubicle on the right), and trying to figure out which topics I want to teach about. I have downloaded (but not yet read) an article about using the news media in Introductory Geology classes. I got to order a free copy of the textbook I will be using, and I’m pulling out interesting chapters from these books that I always said I would use in class if I taught geology again.

I will also be teaching the lab section that goes along with the introductory course. I will get to play with rocks and maps and other fun stuff again. Luckily I won’t have to design all of the labs – I will be able to use the pre-packaged labs that the department already has set up.

I’m nervous and excited about the prospect of teaching geology again 4 days a week for over two hours each day. June is going to be a very busy month for me, because I will be doing this on top of everything else I have going on in the summer.

Since many librarians have an MS or an MA is a discipline other than librarianship (in addition to their MLS), I was wondering how often other librarians teach in their disciplines. It doesn’t seem very common. I know of librarians who teach as adjuncts in MLS programs, but I only know of one other librarian who teaches in her discipline.