Education Commons^™

Intersections Of Open Access And Information Privilege In Higher Education And Beyond, Caitlin Harrington, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Despite its capacity to reach readers irrespective of affiliation or geographic location, conversations about Open Access (OA) frequently center academic stakeholders in high-income countries. This presentation will examine opportunities for technical services librarians to explore with students some of the inequities of the scholarly communications landscape, including various approaches to and aspects of OA, and to consider the disparate levels of access available to individuals based on institutional affiliation. Because higher education settings afford students a high degree of information privilege, academic librarians face the challenge of teaching students to appreciate the value of information, acknowledge barriers to it, and …

Texts On Repeat: Examining The Persistence Of Assigned Course Materials, Rachel E. Scott, Julie Murphy, Rachel Park, Anne Shelley, Mallory Jallas

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Many academic libraries’ collection development policies have discouraged the acquisition of assigned textbooks, but recent trends to support textbook affordability, student success, and online learning have caused some library personnel to rethink this approach. Through recent efforts at our library to purchase available e-copies for assigned course textbooks, we became curious about title persistence, or the frequency with which a unique title is assigned across multiple semesters and within a single semester across multiple sections. In this presentation we provide some background and context for our textbook affordability efforts and examine several years of assigned textbook data at Illinois State …

Citizenship Starts Here: A Community Engaged Approach To Civic Education, Grace Northern

Stevenson Center for Community and Economic Development—Student Research

Abstract:

In 2015, Illinois legislators passed HB 4025 which required every public high school to include a civics course for students to complete before graduation. In 2019, this bill was expanded to include middle school students through Public Act 101-025. In this study, I investigate how the civic education standards as outlined by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and other school climate factors impacted middle school students’ civic engagement. I used data collected from the Center of Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) and the Illinois Civics Hub. The sample consisted of 497 middle school …

Textbook Affordability Initiatives And Open Educational Resources: Complementary Or Competing Approaches To A Persistent Problem?, Anne Shelley, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This presentation investigates library support for textbook affordability initiatives and Open Educational Resources (OER) to consider the relative opportunities and limitations of both approaches. The literature has shown that the cost of textbooks—which has increased far beyond the rate of inflation—can be an obstacle to student success, especially for students from underrepresented groups. By sharing findings from published literature and results from focus groups and interviews conducted with teaching faculty, the speakers highlight both the incentives faculty have to collaborate with librarians to address the increasing costs of assigned materials as well as the challenges they face in adopting an …

Teaching Information Literacy In An Undergraduate Class On The Geography Of The Middle East, Reecia Orzeck

Faculty Publications-- Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Geography instructors have a role to play in helping their students to become more information literate. This is especially important today, given the complex and dynamic nature of our informational landscape, and given the evidence that young people lack much of the knowledge that is needed to engage with information critically. This paper reports on the effectiveness of an information literacy module that was included as part of a course on the Geography of the Middle East. It describes the design and rollout of the module, and the results of a study designed to assess the effectiveness of the module …