Category: information literacy

For as long as there have been reference desks in libraries, there has been a debate and a discussion about the nature of the reference transaction.  In some cases, the reference transaction is simply a question and answer exchange. The patron asks the question, the librarian finds the answer and passes it along:

Q: Who was the 32nd president of the united states?

A: Franklin D. Roosevelt

But in many cases, the reference transaction is about much more than simply providing answers, it’s about teaching the patron how to find the answer themselves.

Q: Who was the 32nd president of the united states?

A: Well, a quick google search leads us to the Wikipedia list of presidents.  Here it lists Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 32nd president, and provides some citations for that information.  If you are just curious, the Wikipedia list will be perfect, but if you need to cite this in a paper, you might want to refer to the White House website, which would be more authoritative and provides some good biographical information.  Do you need to find more information about Roosevelt?  if so, we may have some biographies of him in our collection….

Just like any other learning opportunity, a big part of the whole experience is retention – do the students/patrons remember what you taught them an hour from now, a week from now or a month from now.

With that in mind, librarians at my library will be working on some new practices for the Spring semester.  Building on the tendency of librarians to jot down search terms or possible databases while working with a patron, we will be making a more concerted effort to write down notes as we answer a question and give those notes to the student when we are done.  The idea here is that students will better be able to retain the knowledge they gained if they can refer back to the notes that were taken.

We’d like to try and capture information on this student learning, so we are going to try two things.  First, we will be using standardized carbonless duplicate note-taking forms.  This way the student gets a copy of the notes, and we can retain a copy for future study.  Second, we hope to combine this with an assessment of student learning at the reference desk (or at least an assessment of what students think they learned at the reference desk) by asking students to fill out a brief survey asking them what they learned.

Hopefully we can be more deliberate in making sure students walk away with a record of the transaction and this will increase the learning that goes on during a reference transaction.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

From the ACRL? Or from the disciplinary organizations?

The ACRL Information Literacy standards have often frustrated me.  I struggle to find their usefulness to my day-to-day work, since the content of most of my information literacy sessions comes from conversations with the professor of the class, and are geared directly to student assignments.  As such, use of the standards usually involves fitting what I’m already doing back into the structure of the standards.  And because the standards are meant to apply to all disciplines, they suffer from being both too vague and too specific at the same time.

I also don’t find them very useful when it comes to convincing faculty members that their students need to learn information literacy skills.

On the other hand, the information literacy standards that come from disciplinary organizations like the ACS and the APA might actually be useful.

First, the faculty members might actually care about them.  Let’s be honest, when was the last time a faculty member was concerned about their students meeting the standards set out by the ACRL?  They are busy enough trying to meet their own standards and goals.

Secondly, because the disciplinary standards have been developed by faculty in the disciplines, they are more likely to align with the skills needed in those particular disciplines.  They are more likely to provide practical guidance about what to teach students, how papers and projects can be geared to meet the standards, and how this can be assessed.

Oh, and the disciplinary standards are typically shorter.

Am I abandoning the ACRL standards completely?  Probably not. But I would encourage librarians to make sure they are aware of any education related standards and outcomes set forth by disciplines they work with.  It might be useful.

I’ve been kicking around some thoughts lately about why and how to teach students about retractions and rebuttals of scientific papers.  I recently wrote a bit about researcher use (or lack thereof) of rebuttals, and NPR made me aware of this recent high profile retraction from Science of a prominent paper about the genetic component of longevity.  So the concepts have been floating around in my head for a bit, and as I brainstorm, it seems to come down to Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.

Who?  Either a faculty member or a librarian can teach students about retractions.  It might be easier for a faculty member to partner with a librarian instead of developing the class material from scratch.

What?  We teach students about peer review, about how the goal of the process is to make sure published articles contain sound methods and reasonable data analysis.  Perhaps we need to go the extra step and talk about the limitations of peer review.  The NPR story showcases a great example:

In an email, Science editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts points out that research papers are built on a wide variety of new, highly complex technologies. Finding a team of reviewers with all of the needed expertise is tricky. And how many reviewers are enough to be sure nothing slips through? The answer, Alberts says, is not always clear.

Criticisms of peer review are nothing new, and students should learn what peer review is good at, and what it’s bad at.

We can also talk about the less common cases of scientific fraud.

Importantly, we can also teach students strategies to determine if a paper they want to use has been retracted.  While some online systems make this clear, not all of them do.  Citation searching is one strategy that can help, and teaching students to do a complete literature review (not just taking the three first references you find) can be useful.

Where and When?  Students in introductory classes are just starting to figure things out.  What is a journal article?  Why can’t I use Wikipedia?  While it is tempting to introduce everything everything related to finding and using the scientific literature at once, I’m not sure it’s practical.  Perhaps peer review is introduced to students as sophomores, but we wait to discuss retractions (and science ethics) until junior or senior seminars?  Perhaps it is a good fit for a session in which citation tracking is discussed?

Why? Why take important class time to discuss these issues?  One of the main goals of undergraduate science education is to prepare students to think critically.  Neglecting this topic may give students the impression that peer review is sacrosanct, and discourage them from critically analyzing the methods and data analysis sections of papers they read.  In addition, students are learning to be scientists. Learning about the highs (publication) and lows (retraction) of scientific communication is an important part of their education.

How?  Class discussions about peer review and science ethics can lead naturally to a discussion of retractions and rebuttals.  Hands-on sessions focused on teaching students to search for primary research articles can include exercises focused on citation searching and include examples of retracted papers.  Controversial topics in science may provide term paper and project opportunities that allow students to research scientific disagreements.  Easy to read commentary on sites like Retraction Watch or news articles can provide students with the background needed to understand the issues.

What other strategies can we use to teach students about these concepts?

Update (7/27/2011): This excellent blog post over on Retraction Watch might be a useful reference or reading for students.  It discusses a recent article in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics that discusses why journal editors retract – or don’t retract – articles.

This isn’t news to librarians, but I find that students (and occasionally faculty) get caught up in equating research with the research databases.

Take two recent examples.

This week I met with some math students who were looking for scholarly and non-scholarly articles and information to help them solve a particular mathematics problem.  They had been using MathSciNet and Google to help them find appropriate information, with mixed results.  I was able to provide them with a few technical tips on improving their searches (+ and – operators in Google, subject classifications in MathSciNet, etc.), but that wasn’t what they really needed.  What was most useful to them was an opportunity to think through all the different aspects of their problem.  In this case, I merely acted as a facilitator – my three semesters of calculus did not give me the required knowledge to help them come up with synonyms or alternative search terms.  But I could ask questions: What are the various aspects of your problem?  What are some alternative terms that would define these aspects?  What are the various approaches you’ve tried to solve the problem?

When their faculty adviser asked me to meet with them, he thought our discussion might focus more on the technical aspects of the databases.  He sat in on the session, and was vital in helping the students brainstorm their additional search terms.  I think he learned a bit about guiding students through the research process (plus a couple of tips about searching Google), and our collaboration really benefited the students.

In another case, I had a student who needed to write a paper describing some aspect of the effect of the hypothalamus on the pituitary gland.  For her, the massive quantity of information on this topic was overwhelming, and I was able to provide her with some guidance on how to focus her topic.  We looked at a Wikipedia article listed some specific hormones and their specific effects.  We looked at some search results lists and picked out a few topic ideas.  We talked about how she can use the background information she is collecting from textbooks to select a focus.  And only then did we talk about taking that focus back into the databases to find relevant information for her project.

Overall, she came away with a much better strategy for completing her project.  It wasn’t about “click here, then click there”.

At the same time, most of our faculty initiated requests for library instruction sessions start out with a database name.

I’m not saying that this isn’t important – it is – and there are some tricky technical issues involved in navigating our OpenURL system too.  I would make the argument that for many students, it is easier for them to learn a search interface on their own than it is to develop an overall strategy for completing the information gathering portion of their projects.

On Wednesday, I stayed a bit late after work to attend a peer editing session for a class I’ve been working with all semester.  This wasn’t in our original plan, but a few weeks ago it made sense that perhaps I could offer students some assistance with their citations during the same session where they were reviewing their peer’s writing.  We didn’t have a well thought out plan for my participation, but decided to give it a try.

It was an incredibly good use of my time.

I had previously reviewed the mechanics of citation with the students, as well as discussed some best practices of in-text citation:

• When to cite
• What doesn’t need to be cited (and what the lack of a citation implies)
• How to use author’s names as the subject of a sentence (and avoid the passive voice)

In the peer editing session, I simply went from group to group looking at papers, making suggestions and answering questions.  Students asked a lot more questions than they would have if they had to seek me out (via email or in my office), and one student’s question would often help out another student.

Overall, I would do it again.  In classes where I know they do peer editing, I may volunteer to come in and help with citation related questions.