Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Workshops Mise En Place: Working With Campus Partners To Cook Up Tech Workshops In The Library, Nancy R. Curtis, Grace Liu, Anne Marie Engelsen

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Blockchain In Libraries, Michael Meth

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 55, no. 8), “Blockchain in Libraries,” examines the application of blockchain in libraries. Blockchain technology has the ability to transform how libraries provide services and organize information. To date, most of these applications are still in the conceptual stage. However, sooner or later, development and implementation will follow. This report is intended to provide a primer on the technology and some thought starters. In chapter 2, the concept of blockchain is explained. Chapter 3 provides eight thought and conversation starters that look at how blockchain could be applied in libraries. Chapter 4 looks …

Chinese College Students' Health Information Seeking Behavior: Implications For Academic Libraries, Yanxia Shi, Lili Luo

Faculty Publications

In 2016, Zexi Wei, a 21-year old Chinese college student died after receiving experimental treatment for synovial sarcoma at the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps. He learned about this treatment from a promoted result on the Chinese search engine Baidu (the equivalent of Google in China), and ultimately discovered that the hospital had misled patients by providing fraudulent information about the treatment's success rate. Wei's death prompted Chinese regulators to investigate Baidu's advertising practices, and drew widespread attention from the public about the ill-regulated practices of online dissemination of health information. As academic librarians, this tragic incident …

Examining Good-Game Design Mechanics That Enhance Student Motivation: A Case Study Of “The Research Race” Game, Ngoc-Yen Tran

Faculty and Staff Publications

The Research Race (hereon referred to simply as The Race) is an active learning game played in one-shot information literacy sessions. It is an exercise that has students working together in teams to find answers and to locate materials in a friendly competition with their classmates, while also introducing them to the physical and digital spaces of the library. This chapter outlines how to play The Race and gives rationale for how The Race can enhance motivation through the use of good game design mechanics.

Supporting Open Information Literacy Via Hybridised Design Experiments, Kristen Rebmann

Faculty Publications

This report discusses a project that forms connections between design experiment and informed learning approaches to designing learning activities supportive of open information literacy and scholarly communication among library and information science graduate students. Open information literacy is defined as information literacy relating specifically toward leveraging open access and open educational resources. Focus is placed on implications for research and practice by exploring one example of a hybridised, informed learning design experiment that fused subject content and open information practice. This project report represents an early step in thinking about the possibilities of infusing informed learning research structures and strategies …

Fake News And The Caulfield Technique, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

Students are fighting a flood. Social media, news feeds, and more saturate them with misleading and fact-free information. In his open access ebook, “Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers” (webliteracy.pressbooks.com), Michael Caulfield lays out practical, hands on techniques for determining the validity of online information. The director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University, Vancouver, and the editor of the New Horizons column for the EDUCAUSE Review, Michael Caulfield provides four strategies students can use to fact check information they find online:

• Check for previous work
• Go upstream to the source
• Read laterally
• Circle back

In this session, …

Health Information Programming In Public Libraries: A Content Analysis, Lili Luo

Faculty Publications

Health information programs, defined as library programs focusing on health-related topics, are an essential way for public libraries to reach out to their user communities, raising awareness of and interest in healthy lifestyle, promoting access to quality health information, and ultimately enhancing health literacy of the citizenry. This study presents a content analysis of the health information programs provided by a large urban public library system in the past year, seeking to strengthen the professional understanding of how public libraries can contribute to health literacy improvement through effective programming, and help other libraries gain insights on health information program planning …

Using The Anti-Racism Digital Library And Thesaurus To Understand Information Access, Authority, Value And Privilege, Anita Coleman

Faculty Publications

The new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, specifically the six threshold concepts about information mirror the experiences of the author as a researcher studying the representation of anti-racism in bibliographic information systems. Anti-racism, in general, is a great concept to use when teaching information literacy and the paper discusses how antiracism information literacy can be taught and learned as part of theological and religious studies education. Since the conference is in Atlanta, the article begins with two stories about the scholar Dubois who lived there and that illustrate some of the IL concepts discussed.

Book Review: Reading, Research, And Writing: Teaching Information Literacy With Process-Based Research Assignments, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

Research papers are ubiquitous in college, as common for freshmen as they are for seniors. To support these assignments, librarians typically have been limited to “go-here-click-that” one-shot sessions. Frequently, the results are faculty who are unhappy with the quality of student papers and librarians who are frustrated that they cannot contribute more to student learning and success. Reading, Research, and Writing takes scholarship from psychology, education, library science, and rhetoric and communication and, in six concise chapters, demonstrates that focusing on the messy process of research, rather than its product, leads to better learning outcomes. To keep the spotlight firmly …

Book Review: Rewired: Research-Writing Partnerships Within The Frameworks, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

On many campuses, writing skills and research skills are supported in separate instructional silos. When it comes to college composition assignments, however, writing and research are interdependent, and this close relationship is evident in the many common elements shared by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. How the core concepts in these frameworks interconnect and how librarians and writing instructors can work together to implement them in the classroom is the focus of Rewired.

Crafting The Question: Get The Most Out Of Your Student Response System, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

Socrative, Poll Everywhere, clicker -- no matter which student response system you use, the key to its effectiveness is in the questions you create. This presentation explores how to craft questions that engage students and help assess their understanding. Participants will be introduced to the anatomy of a multiple-choice question and learn to differentiate between effective and ineffective questions. Illustrations will focus on topics covered in a standard information literacy session, and participants will learn how to incorporate student response systems into lesson plans to better achieve student learning objectives.Participants will:be able to create effective multiple-choice questions for use with …

Are You Hip?: Building The Value Of Libraries And Library Instruction With High-Impact Practices, Ngoc-Yen Tran

Faculty and Staff Publications

There is growing evidence that, when done well, High-Impact Educational Practices (HIPs) programs and activities have been shown to be beneficial in increasing rates of retention and engagement amongst students from many backgrounds. Therefore, it is no surprise that higher education institutions are developing activities firmly rooted in the philosophies of the HIPs. Examples of HIPs include common intellectual experiences, learning communities, and service learning. These practices are broad and depending on the institution, they can take on many different forms or activities. In order to encourage participation, these activities are often combined with one another and offered in a …

In N Out — Reaching Out To The Community From Within Our Student Body, Ann Fiegen, Michael Germano, Julie Shen, Jordan Nielsen, Yuhfen Diana H. Wu

Faculty and Staff Publications

As a way to enhance their educational experience and promote global citizenship, students in higher education are often expected to participate in activities beyond the walls of their universities. These activities may include study abroad, internships, service learning projects, and much more. While these activities can take place far from the university setting, they also often occur in the university’s local community, where our students work or volunteer at local businesses, nonprofit organizations, and service agencies. These students bring their real world projects to their course work, where libraries and librarians engage with them to find real world solutions using …

The Students Run The Session: Hands Off One-Shots With A Library Game, Miriam Rigby, Ngoc-Yen Tran, Annie Zeidman-Karpinski

Faculty and Staff Publications

Librarian-instructors lead lots of one-shot sessions and often have a lot to cover to help students learn everything that they need to know. Coupled with the desire to include ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework, there are so many concepts and skills to convey that even the most eager students (and librarians) can feel overwhelmed or unengaged. Our answer is the Research Race - an active learning exercise that applies what cognitive science knows about good game design to get students to explore library resources in class. Rather than instruction via lecture, the game has students working in teams to find answers …

Book Review: Critical Literacy For Information Professionals, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

A review of the book Critical Literacy for Information Professionals edited by Sarah McNicol. “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information,” wrote Paulo Freire in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed(Herder and Herder 1970, 79). Freire argued that rather than viewing students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge—termed the “banking model” of education—teachers should recognize and value students’ individual perspectives and life experiences. Today’s critical literacy movement has its roots in Freire’s philosophy. When taught critical literacy methods, students begin from the viewpoint that there can be no single “correct” way to interpret information. Instead, …

Student Confidence/Overconfidence In The Research Process, Valeria Molteni, Emily Chan

Faculty and Staff Publications

Librarians with instructional responsibilities will base information literacy session content upon course syllabi and teaching faculty's assessments of student readiness. Often students' self-perceived competencies do not factor into the lesson planning process. The aim of this project is to collect the levels of self-confidence for a group of students who are primarily entering health care professions. This study observes students' levels of self-confidence in performing research-related activities and their corresponding ability to correctly answer content questions for those tasks. Students' self-confidence ratings are not reliable indicators for information literacy competence. The confidence levels for information literacy tasks of students entering …

A Qualitative Examination About Providers’ Perceptions And Recommendations Regarding The Role Of Public Librarians In Addressing Communities’ Health Literacy., Van Ta Park, Lili Luo, Denise Rosidi

Faculty Publications

We assessed health care providers’ perspectives on libraries as a source of health information and elicited input on how to adequately prepare public librarians to provide health information services. Sample text-based reference transactions were shown to determine whether they think the health inquiries were adequately answered. Results showed that participants had favorable perspectives about public libraries, and thought that the public librarians’ role includes addressing the health literacy community needs. Participants provided recommendations for public librarians to improve health literacy. To enhance the ability of public librarians to meet the health literacy needs of their communities, diverse perspectives such as …

Using Rubrics For Information Literacy Skill Assessment: A Case Study For Business Education, Bobbi Makani, Ann Agee, Marilyn E. Easter, Yuhfen Diana H. Wu

Faculty and Staff Publications

Information literacy—the ability to find, evaluate and use information effectively—is an essential skill set. The authors examine how assignments such as case analyses and research reports help business students master these abilities and provide examples of how analytic rubrics with measurable outcomes are particularly suited to assessing these skills. Also demonstrated is how librarians enhance and support student learning of information literacy by teaching in-depth research skills. Working together, professors and librarians can give students a solid foundation in the information-handling skills they need to be effective and productive in the workplace today.

Sources: Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy To Empower Learners, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

A review of the book Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners, by Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson. Transliteracy, visual literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, mobile literacy—there has been a struggle for years to define how technology changes the way people understand and use information. For academic librarians, information literacy has been the approach of choice. In one-shot sessions and semester-long courses, we teach students how to determine what information is needed and how to find it, evaluate it, and use it ethically. In Metaliteracy, the authors argue that information literacy as a concept needs to be updated …

Teaching 21st Century, Executive-Functioning, And Creativity Skills With Popular Video Games And Apps, Randy Kulman, Teresa Slobuski, Roy Seitsinger

Faculty and Staff Publications

21st century skills, include flexible thinking, collaborative communication skills, executive funtiona nd critical thinking skills, and digital literacy, will be necessary for education and jobs in the future. Video games and apps are an exteremly powerful tool for teaching 21st century skills due to game mechanics that build in learning principles and their highly engaging nature. Games such as Minecraft, Portal 2 and variety of casual video games have been demonstrated to teach skills, such as problem solving, processing efficiency, cognitive flexibility, and the 21st century skill of digital literacy.

Text 4 Health: Addressing Consumer Health Information Needs Via Text Reference Service, Van M. Ta Park

Faculty Publications

This study seeks to provide empirical evidence about how health-related questions are answered in text reference service in order to further the understanding of how to best use texting as a reference service venue to fulfill people’s health information needs. Two hundred health reference transactions from My Info Quest, the first nation-wide collaborative text reference service, were analyzed identify the types of questions, length of transactions, question-answering behavior, and information sources used in the transactions. Findings indicate that texting-based health reference transactions are usually brief, and cover a wide variety of topics. The most popular questions are those seeking general …

Crafting Assessment Questions: Creating The Tools To Assess Information Literacy Objectives For Art And Design: A Workshop, Rebecca Feind, Kathy Clarke

Faculty and Staff Publications

Now that information literacy standards for higher education have been created and are commonly incorporated within university curricula, assessing student mastery of the objectives is the next step in creating a measurable information literacy program. In addition to responding to institutional needs for data on student learning, assessment data is a valuable resource for updating instruction programs based on student knowledge and performance. While many librarians have vast amounts of anecdotal knowledge about what students know, being able to gather hard data on what students learn from online and in-person instruction can quantify the strengths and needs of your instruction …

More Than A Scavenger Hunt: Using Ipads And Qr Codes To Find Sources In A One-Shot Library Instruction Session, Ngoc-Yen Tran

Faculty and Staff Publications

iPads are fun but they can also be a great tool for one-shot library instruction sessions. In conjunction with QR codes, a structured activity with these devices will get students out of the computer lab, working in groups to find the differences between scholarly and popular articles, primary v. secondary sources, and to use WorldCat Local to find their own sources. Attend the session to find out how the activity is set up and whether or not is possible to have such an elaborate session within the limits of a 50-minute one-shot.

Information Literacy In The Workplace: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Yuhfen Diana H. Wu

Faculty and Staff Publications

This cross-cultural study has two main purposes: to investigate how information literacy is perceived in the workplace and to discover how employees obtain information to carry out their jobs in an effective and timely fashion. This project applies a mix of research methods, including site visits, interviews, and a survey. More than 120 participants from forty companies were involved in this study. They were from a wide variety of industries in Taiwan and Silicon Valley, in Northern California, where many companies base offices or operations from around the world. Major obstacles in conducting cross-continent research are cost, time demands, scheduling, …

Going Beyond A Library Tour: Leading One-Shots Using Ipads And Qr Codes, Ngoc-Yen Tran

Faculty and Staff Publications

According to the 2011 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology report, "institutions and instructors do not fully harness [technologies] to create opportunities for more varied, inspiring, and beyond-the-classroom learning experiences." The challenge for libraries is how to use technologies to excite and provide experiential learning for students so that they can improve their information literacy skills. Using iPads in conjunction with QR codes, a structured fifty-minute session was developed to engage students with information. In groups of 3-5, students completed the activity together. Each group was given the same activity but with different topics and sources to examine. …

Ipad 2s For Everyone! Catching Students’ Attention In Library One-Shots, Ngoc-Yen Tran

Faculty and Staff Publications

“You are an exercise science major and you have a mid-term essay due in two weeks. You’ve chosen to write about the benefits of yoga. The assignment requires you to find at least 2 peer-reviewed articles (also known as scholarly articles).” This is the scenario that I have given to students during one-shots and although that does not excite them, seeing iPads being distributed in conjunction with the activity certainly does. But, instead of using the iPad as a parallel to a computer (meaning that students use the web app to find materials), the students use the iPads to scan …

Cognitive Interviewing Using A Carl Grant: Keeping Research Valid On A Budget, Francis E. Howard, Tina Peterson, Tom Hewitt

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Does Pedagogy Matter To Librarians?, Anamika Dasgupta

Faculty and Staff Publications

I started attending Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) events in 2008 when I received a Title III faculty mini-grant to do research in the use of new and evolving technologies in teaching and learning. I attended the first event because it was mandatory for grant recipients. These events were very informative and stimulating because guest speakers and audiences talked about the various teaching methods that they incorporated into their practices. And since then I continued to attend CETL events whenever possible. In most colleges and universities, librarians conduct Information Literacy classes and help students at the reference …

Digital Image Databases: A Study From The Undergraduate Point Of View, Teresa Slobuski

Faculty and Staff Publications

This article investigates current metadata practices in art image databases. Searches were completed in the Bridgeman Education and ARTstor databases using only terms found in introductory art history texts. Details from the search results point to overalltrends in the data and offer comparisons between the databases for particular search sets. The examples reveal tendencies in precision,recall, and consistency, as well as identify some particular issues that may impede successful retrieval for the novice user. A short discussion on the usability of both of the databases' interfaces offers further insight into their respective strengths andpeculiarities.

Standardised Library Instruction Assessment: An Institution-Specific Approach, Shannon M. Staley, Nicole A. Branch, Tom L. Hewitt

Faculty and Staff Publications

Introduction
We explore the use of a psychometric model for locally-relevant, information literacy assessment, using an online tool for standardised assessment of student learning during discipline-based library instruction sessions.

Method
A quantitative approach to data collection and analysis was used, employing standardised multiple-choice survey questions followed by individual, cognitive interviews with undergraduate students. The assessment tool was administered to five general education psychology classes during library instruction sessions.

Analysis
Descriptive statistics were generated by the assessment tool. Results. The assessment tool proved a feasible means of measuring student learning. While student scores improved on every survey question, there was uneven …