First-Year courses are the bread and butter of many academic libraries’ information literacy programs, and the same is certainly true for us at W&J. First-Year information literacy instruction sessions are an opportunity to welcome students to the library and to campus and get them up to speed early in their college careers (Goodsett and Schmillen, 2022, pp. 91, 95). Goodsett and Schmillen (2022) discuss in their article, “Fostering Critical Thinking in First-Year Students through Information Literacy Instruction,” that these sessions are also opportunities to foster greater critical thinking skills (both of which are critical to their success as college students) (pp. 93, 98-100). At W&J, we’re working to find a better path forward to make our information literacy and critical thinking instruction more effective for our first-year students through a multi-pronged approach.
Our current experience at W&J mirrors the experiences reported by Goodsett and Schmillen (2022) – many libraries are frequently trying to do too much in one-shot instruction sessions in first-year classes (pp. 100, 102, 104). As argued by Christina Heady, Jennifer Horton, and Joshua Vossler (2023, March) at ACRL 2023, the one-shot structure is not ideal for incorporating all of the information literacy and critical thinking skills librarians would like to impart to first-year students. However, at W&J, we have been doing our best to squish in as much as possible our 70- or 115-minute class sessions, especially since many of the solutions proposed by Heady, Horton, and Vossler (2023, March) were best suited for larger institutions with dozens if not hundreds of employees. With that said, squeezing in material is challenging for librarians to teach and students to retain. This is exacerbated by the fact that many first-year seminars are moving away from traditional research assignments, and so students struggle to apply the information literacy skills we teach them when they visit the library during their first few weeks of classes.
In the Fall 2022 semester, we began an academic year-long pilot program to incorporate information literacy instruction into English Composition (W&J’s equivalent of first-year writing) courses. The instruction sessions encompassed a wide range of basic information literacy concepts from topic and keyword development, search strategies for popular library databases, and critical and contextual source evaluation. The assignments in English Composition are more traditional research projects, and so we hoped that those assignments would make it easier for the students to apply the information literacy skills discussed in our sessions. This program took off beyond our hopes, thanks to the enthusiasm of the department chair and the adjunct instructors who teach the majority of the English Composition classes. We were able to visit all but one or two sections in the Fall semester and visited all sections in the Spring semester.
The success of the pilot program and the ill-fitting nature of the assignments commonly assigned in first year seminars have presented an opportunity for us to strive more towards by Heady, Horton, and Vossler’s (2023, March) more integrated approach through the creation of a multipronged approach to first-year library instruction. This approach, which we will try for the Fall 2023 semester, will involve the first-year seminar library instruction transforming into more of an orientation to the library (a direction we explored during the Fall 2022 semester with success) with the option for professors to request a more in-depth information literacy session and the expansion of the English Composition pilot program to include more than one librarian teaching the 7-10 sections each semester. We are also looking for more ways to incorporate primary source literacy into our English Composition lesson plans. We plan to continue our personal librarian model in the first-year seminars because we have found that it helps students feel more comfortable navigating the library to have a familiar face around. This new program is an experiment, but hopefully one that will give us more opportunities to engage with students and encourage them to develop/hone their critical thinking and information literacy skills over the course of their first year in college.
How do you structure your work with first-year students? I’d love to hear about other models as well as any feedback on our plans!
References
Goodsett, M., & Schmillen, H. (2022, January). “Fostering critical thinking in first-year students through information literacy instruction.” College & Research Libraries, 83(1), pp. 91-110. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.1.91.
Heady, C., Horton, J., & Vossler, J. (2023, March). The questionable efficacy of one-shot instruction for first-year students: a scoping review [Contributed Paper]. ACRL 2023, Pittsburgh, PA.
Presented by
Emma H. Beaver, Angela R. Davis, Kristin E. C. Green, Elizabeth Nelson
Wednesday, May 17 at 1:00 pm EST
Looking for ideas on how to make your one-shots more fun without sacrificing your learning outcomes? Come to this session to hear from four instruction librarians as we each share a strategy, resource, or lesson plan that lets students play their way toward information literacy. We’ll share a variety of approaches for different “levels” of gamification, from lesson plans with subtle game-like elements to sessions built around a keyword selection card game, that you can adapt for your own instruction.
Emma H. Beaver is the Head Librarian at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus. She has been a librarian for seven years, and has worked in both public and academic libraries. Her current research interests include seed libraries and home/work-life balance. Angela R. Davis is a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Penn State Behrend, located in Erie, PA. She has been a librarian for ten years and has experience working with STEM students and undergraduate researchers in general. Her current research interests center around librarians teaching for-credit courses and analysis of reference and research services in academic libraries. Kristin E. C. Green has been a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Penn State Scranton for seven years where she teaches course-related information literacy, develops various collections, and programs co-curricular events. Her research primarily focuses on the pedagogy of information literacy education and professional development for teaching faculty in information literacy. Elizabeth Nelson has been a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Penn State Lehigh Valley for four years and previously worked in several other academic libraries since gaining her MLIS in 2015. Her instruction support focuses on early career students across the campus, as well as specific courses within business, the humanities, IST, and game studies. Currently, her research areas include gamified instruction, the experiences of librarians as instructors of record of for-credit courses, gaming communities as social third spaces, and open educational resources.
We will mute participants on entry into the Zoom room. Session will be recorded and available on YouTube after the session. We will enable Zoom’s Live Transcription feature during the session.
If you would like to present with C&CS, please contact the C&CS team.
This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, Governor.
Support is also provided by the College and Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association.
Open Science and Modular Publishing
Since the release of the Nelson Memo, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” (OSTP, August 25, 2022), there has been a great deal of discussion about public access to scientific scholarship and data. But the concept of open science is not limited to just that which is publicly funded.
An Introduction to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science states, “Open science is a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole.”
The UNESCO Recommendation, which is the major international standard has six guiding principles:
1. Transparency, scrutiny, critique and reproducibility—to reinforce the rigor of scientific results, enhance the positive impact of science on society and increase society’s ability to solve complex interconnected problems.
2. Equality of opportunities—to ensure that all scientists and those with an interest in science have equal opportunity to access, contribute to and benefit from science, regardless of origin or circumstance.
3. Responsibility, respect and accountability—to be responsible for and aware of public accountability, potential conflicts of interest, intellectual integrity and the possible social or ecological consequences of research activities.
4. Collaboration, participation and inclusion—to ensure that scientific collaborations transcend the boundaries of geography, language and resources, and include knowledge from marginalized communities to solve problems of great social importance.
5. Flexibility—to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all way to practice open science and to encourage different pathways to practicing it while upholding the core values.
6. Sustainability—to be as efficient and impactful as possible by building on long-term practices, services, infrastructures and funding models to ensure participation of scientists from less-privileged countries or institutions.
There are many active initiatives designed to support open science. One is to reimagine the dissemination process using open access modular publishing. Launched in 2022, Octopus and ResearchEquals are two freely available platforms for publishing components of one’s research in an open online forum.
One of the problems with Gold Open Access publishing is that it transfers the cost of publication from the consumer to the researcher looking to get published in the form of article publishing charges. A fee paid by the author. The drawback to Green Open Access publishing is many OA repositories have an embargo period before a publication is made freely available.
In the case of ResearchEquals the author must pay if they want to have their work published using a more restrictive Creative Commons license. Octopus also employs Creative Commons licenses, but requires one which allows derivative works.
The publication types in Octopus are based on the eight stages of scientific research:
- Research Problem
- Rationale/Hypothesis
- Method
- Results
- Analysis
- Interpretation
- Real World Application
- Peer Review
For ResearchEquals there are many more publication types and they are called modules. Thus, enabling the publication of text, data, code and media. With both platforms, each publication is assigned its own DOI.
Research & TikTok
While information literacy is fascinating to those of us who are information professionals, it is often a struggle to get our students excited about this topic. Over the past year, I have been trying to think of ways to make research, especially citations, more exciting to students. As we all know, TikTok is the social media platform of choice for this generation, and so, I started thinking about how I could use TikTok as a means of connecting with my students. This thought led me to create my “How is research like social media” activity.
For this activity, I get the students’ attention by asking them to get out their phones and scroll through TikTok and Instagram. This immediately gets them to sit up and pay closer attention because they’re often surprised and a little skeptical that an instructor actually wants them to get on social media. Then, instead of mindlessly scrolling, I ask them to follow a specific hashtag, trend, or account. I give them only about three to five minutes to do this because they do this so much, they don’t really need a lot of time on this part of the activity. After this, I give them a peer-reviewed research article to skim through. This works best if you can pick an article that has the citations hyperlinked. I have the students skim the article and specifically focus on the in-text citations and the reference lists.
Finally, we come back together and have a class discussion on how research is like social media. This is a tricky concept for students to grasp, but normally, one or two students start to put the pieces together by this point. Once one student starts thinking out loud about it, the whole class starts to jump in and understand. The purpose of this activity is for students to see citations in research articles as similar to tags and hashtags in social media posts. Just like how we tag people in a social media post to give them credit for an idea, we use in-text citations in a research paper to give credit to the original researcher. I explain that in-text citations are the equivalent of “@ing” or “tagging” someone.
Students also point out that the citations all lead to articles on similar topics to the original article, and they notice this is similar to the way hashtags link together social media posts on similar topics. Often during this activity, students will say that both scrolling through social media and clicking through the references and citations in a research article allow them to “go down the rabbit hole” on a particular subject. I then push this idea further and explain to the students that their research is part of a conversation on their research topic. I tell them to think about their paper as a response to the other researchers just like how they may comment, share, and interact with content on social media.
So far, this has been more popular than a typical plagiarism discussion, and it gets the students much more excited about research! I have also noticed many of the professors who have watched me do this activity have been surprised and walk away thinking about social media in a different way. This activity has been a great way to get students to look at research differently, and it has made faculty see social media differently. Therefore, having this conversation has helped bridge that gap between the generations, and I look forward to continuing to develop and use this discussion in my info lit sessions.
Redefining the role of a student assistant
By: Kim Karim
As the supervisor of student workers in an academic library setting at a small liberal arts college, I have always been motivated to make sure my students have the best possible working experience. For the students we hire here at Snowden Library, our Circulation Assistant position is often times their first campus job. It is also their first time truly balancing a full course load with work and other campus activities.
At our circulation desk, there is downtime between helping patrons find and check out materials, answering questions and helping students print from our computers. As a service desk that must be staffed at all times during open hours, we’ve struggled finding the right balance between having our students be just a body at the counter and making their work here at the library meaningful and also supportive of the full-time employees.
Many of my student workers have come to me when putting together a resume and asked for describing what their job duties consist of here at our library. I point them in the direction of the job description we post on our library website, but I often challenge them to think more critically about the skills they have learned here.
Often times, this will get me thinking about what we are actually teaching them, aside from library policies and procedures. I strive to show our students that punctuality is very important when arriving for a shift. Being respectful of their peers’ time and not being late is an expectation the students have set amongst themselves. Communication, respect, honesty – these are all values the students have said they expect when working with their fellow circulation assistants. Knowing this has challenged me, and our Head of Access Services, to think outside the box on how we can allow our students to grow in their positions.
We have added new responsibilities to the students’ checklists, including a question recorder form and patron head counts they conduct during their shifts. We have challenged the students for their input and suggestions about library changes – such as our physical space, collection ideas and more. We often seek their input for book displays and allow them to pick the materials we place on display. We want them to take pride in their job here. Walking into our front doors and seeing a display or project they had a hand in putting together allows them to feel more included in the library.
It is gratifying as a supervisor to see when my students get excited about something they know has made an impact here. I’m sure it’s comparable to the feeling a faculty member feels as they see the light bulb turn on for a student in their class as they grasp a once foreign concept.
Are there any student engagement strategies that have worked for your team? Feel free to share!
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