Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

A New Approach To Evaluating Information: A Reflection On Radar, Kevin Tanner, Kim Mcphee

Western Libraries Presentations

For instruction librarians, teaching information literacy (IL) skills is often an important aspect of any lesson plan. One area of IL includes the critical evaluation of sources, an essential skill that students need to succeed as aspiring scholars and researchers. This ability to differentiate “good” from “bad” information is beneficial to students beyond their academic careers, and will help them navigate the “sea of information” for the rest of their lives. Typically, such evaluation skills are taught through applying the CRAAP test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. While humorous and memorable, the name of this test devalues the usefulness …

Leveraging Resources Across Units And Universities To Address Academic Literacies And Research Skills In Ontario Graduate Students, Melanie Mills, Elan Paulson

Melanie Mills

Leveraging Resources Across Units And Universities To Address Academic Literacies And Research Skills In Ontario Graduate Students, Melanie Mills, Elan Paulson

Western Libraries Presentations

Student2Scholar (S2S) is a fully online and open course that aims to teach academic literacies and research skills to social science graduate students. Set to launch in December 2015, S2S was conceived of and created by a diverse and distributed team of academic librarians, university staff, and graduate students from three Ontario Universities: Western, the University of Toronto, and Queen’s. Members of the project team brought with them varying degrees of experience and expertise across a range of disciplinary and teaching and learning backgrounds, including: adult education, information literacy, and online learning (to name only a few).

S2S serves as …

Crowdsourcing As An Approach To Customer Relationship Building In Academic Libraries, Lisa A. Ellis, Aisha Pena

Publications and Research

Library initiatives to first-year students not only present an opportunity to offer information literacy instruction for student advancement but they also serve a key marketing function by communicating the library’s ongoing value and building customer relationships. Library orientation tours are an example of how to effectively market to first-year students. Combining peer-to-peer learning and user-generated content via social media known as crowdsourcing, Newman Library sponsored a contest challenging first-year students to create a video sharing a useful library tip. The contributions and benefits of this co-creation approach to fostering relationships are examined and the implications to strengthening other library-user bonds …

Foregrounding The Research Log In Information Literacy Instruction, Louise R. Fluk

Publications and Research

Updating an earlier study, this article reviews the literature of information literacy (IL) instruction since 2008 for empirical evidence of the value of research logs or research journals for effective pedagogy, assessment, and prevention of plagiarism in IL instruction at the college level. The review reveals a mismatch between the acknowledged theoretical and practical value of research log assignments and the mixed advocacy for them in the literature. The article further analyzes the literature for the drawbacks of research log assignments and points toward ways of mitigating these drawbacks.

Breathing Life Into Information Literacy Skills: Results Of A Faculty-Librarian Collaboration, Divonna M. Stebick, Janelle L. Wertzberger, Margaret E. Flora, Joseph W. Miller

Janelle Wertzberger

When an education professor and a reference librarian sought to improve the quality of undergraduate student research, their partnership led to a new focus on assessing the research process in addition to the product. In this study, we reflect on our collaborative experience introducing information literacy as the foundation for undergraduate teacher education research. We examine the outcomes of this collaboration, focusing on the assessment of the process. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that direct instruction supporting effective research strategies positively impacted student projects. Our data also suggest that undergraduate students benefit from not only sound research strategies, …

Introducing Undergraduates To Open Access And The Power Of Collaboration Between Scholarly Communications And Instruction Librarians, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, Annie Knight

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

Undergraduates are often left out of conversations surrounding open access. While they may not share the same concerns about publishing and prestige as faculty and graduate students, they do consume vast amounts of information, and thus can benefit just as much as those farther in their academic careers by knowing how to find, evaluate, and use open access resources. This presentation highlights a successful collaboration between the presenters in their respective roles as scholarly communications librarian and course developer to create and implement curriculum for a 3-unit information literacy course to teach undergraduate students about open access principles. Once the …

Breathing Life Into Information Literacy Skills: Results Of A Faculty-Librarian Collaboration, Divonna M. Stebick, Janelle L. Wertzberger, Margaret E. Flora, Joseph W. Miller

Education Faculty Publications

When an education professor and a reference librarian sought to improve the quality of undergraduate student research, their partnership led to a new focus on assessing the research process in addition to the product. In this study, we reflect on our collaborative experience introducing information literacy as the foundation for undergraduate teacher education research. We examine the outcomes of this collaboration, focusing on the assessment of the process. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that direct instruction supporting effective research strategies positively impacted student projects. Our data also suggest that undergraduate students benefit from not only sound research strategies, …

Situating Information Literacy In The Disciplines: A Practical And Systematic Approach For Academic Librarians, Robert Farrell, William Badke

Publications and Research

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to consider the current barriers to situating in the disciplines and to offer a possible strategy for so doing.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews current challenges facing librarians who seek to situate information literacy in the disciplines and offers and practical model for those wishing to do so. Phenomenographic evidence from disciplinary faculty focus groups is presented in the context of the model put forward.

Findings – Disciplinary faculty do not have generic conceptions of information literacy but rather understand information-related behaviors as part of embodied disciplinary practice.

Practical implications – Librarians …