1 Annotated Bibliography: CUNY Academic Works
Accardi, M. T., Drabinski, E., & Kumbier, A. (2020). Beginning and Extending the Conversation. Communications in Information Literacy, 14 (1), 1-11.https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.1
The co-editors of a special issue of Communications in Information Literacy describe the origins and context for this issue and provide an overview of the ideas and perspectives of the contributors. The issue looks back at the past decade since the publication of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods (Library Juice Press/Litwin Books, 2010).
Adkison, A.H. (2023, October 13). A Journey Through the Library. Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_oers/90/
This chapter describes core services in a library by imagining a narrative tour of the physical space of the library. Students are invited to download and print an accompanying zine, which takes them on a scavenger hunt through the library. By reading about core services and actively using these services, students will learn the basics of how to use their college library.
Topics covered include: the circulation desk, the reference desk, textbook reserves, the reference reading room, library computers, library archives, media services, exhibition spaces.
This is one chapter from a future information literacy textbook for college students. At the date of this posting, the rest of the book is forthcoming. To locate the rest of the book once it is written, use my author name in a search online. It will be published as an OER textbook and affiliated with CUNY (City University of New York).
Almeida, N. (2022). Library Tautology: A Reenactment of the One-Shot. Special issue of C&RL, edited by Nicole Pagowsky, 83(5), 833. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.5.833
If there’s one thing you learn today, let it be this: keywords. Not specific keywords but the idea of them. If you whisper the correct keywords into the algorithm, you will achieve relevance. If you don’t achieve relevance on the first try (which is super common), imagine you’re an academic with a specialization in a super-niche disciplinary area who wrote a research article. Then imagine keywords you (they) would use and try those.
Berger, M. (2023, August 17). Academic Librarians and Pedagogical Approaches to Deterring Predatory Publishing. Academic Works.
The full-text of this Work is currently under embargo. It will be available for download on Saturday, August 17, 2024.
This chapter was originally published in Predatory Practices in Scholarly Publishing and Knowledge Sharing Causes and Implications for Scholarship, edited by Pejman Habibie and Ismaeil Fazel, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003170723.
This chapter discusses the perspectives and experiences of an academic librarian related to the challenging phenomenon of predatory publishing. Academic librarians have extensive scholarly communications knowledge and mitigate predatory publishing when they educate authors on journal and publisher selection as well as how to recognize and avoid predatory publishers. Unintentional predatory publishing is an outcome of deficits in scholarly information literacy—inadequate knowledge and critical thinking related to scholarship. This chapter traces scholarly information literacy from undergraduates to graduate students to its main focus, faculty; it also touches on other factors that underlie unintentional predatory publishing, for example, considerations of an author’s ‘need to read.’ Pedagogical solutions to predatory publishing are represented by a variety of models. Librarian partnerships with campus centers for research or for teaching and learning are particularly effective, as are workshop series that integrate librarian expertise with other specializations. One-on-one consultations are also significant and especially helpful since predatory publishing is a complex and sensitive topic. Lastly, this chapter considers how librarians have played an important role in outstanding international initiatives that deter predatory publishing such as Think. Check. Submit, a self-teaching tool, and The Directory of Open Access (DOAJ), leaders in teaching open access journals publishing best practices.
Boyle, C. (2022). How do you meme?: Using memes for information literacy instruction. The Reference Librarian, 63(3), 82-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2022.2084210
Memes, or image macros, have become a standard method of digital information sharing. This is especially true during times when current events ignite a heightened desire for information seeking among students. Memes can be sources of misinformation, such as during events of the past decade, including recent presidential elections, social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Librarians need to address this format in their information literacy teachings. In this article, the author briefly outlines the rise of internet memes, discusses how higher education students are engaging with them, and highlights some problematic meme-sharing throughout some of the aforementioned events of the past decade. Within the modern information landscape, where misleading information and fake news abound, librarians can and should create and share their own educational memes designed to promote information literacy by example. These librarian-authored memes should also demonstrate source attribution and ethical information sharing practices. Resources for meme creation, tips on how to use them within information literacy instruction, and examples of how the author has included them in her own pedagogy are included.
Brodsky, J.E., Brooks, P.J., Scimeca, D. et al. Improving college students’ fact-checking strategies through lateral reading instruction in a general education civics course. Cogn. Research 6, 23 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00291-4
College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort to teach students lateral reading strategies used by expert fact-checkers to verify online information. Lateral reading requires users to leave the information (website) to find out whether someone has already fact-checked the claim, identify the original source, or learn more about the individuals or organizations making the claim. Instructor-matched sections of a general education civics course implemented the DPI curriculum (N=136 students) or provided business-as-usual civics instruction (N=94 students). At posttest, students in DPI sections were more likely to use lateral reading to fact-check and correctly evaluate the trustworthiness of information than controls. Aligning with the DPI’s emphasis on usingWikipedia to investigate sources, students in DPI sections reported greater use of Wikipedia at posttest than controls, but did not differ significantly in their trust of Wikipedia. In DPI sections, students who failed to read laterally at posttest reported higher trust of Wikipedia at pretest than students who read at least one problem laterally. Responsiveness to the curriculum was also linked to numbers of online assignments attempted, but unrelated to pretest media literacy knowledge, use of lateral reading, or self-reported use of lateral reading. Further research is needed to determine whether improvements in lateral reading are maintained over time and to explore other factors that might distinguish students whose skills improved after instruction from non-responders.
Carey, J., Pathak, A., Johnson, S.C. (2021). Information Literacy Session Attendance and Library Website Visit Frequency: Impacts on Awareness of LibGuides among Undergraduate and Graduate Health Professions Students at an Urban Campus. Academic Works.
Public, large, non-residential four-year and master’s college with separate Health Professions Library (HPL) serving 1,300+ health professions students. The Hunter College Libraries offer over 180 LibGuides via the “Research Guides” link on library’s home page. HPL librarians teach one-shot and other information literacy (IL) sessions for students.
Cohn, S.B. (2022). Research in the Digital Age. [Syllabus] Academic Works.
Syllabus for LIB 10000: Research in the Digital Age. Spring 2022.
Diao, J. The Concept, Design, Implementation, and Assessment of Case-Based Learning in an Information Literacy Classroom. Academic Works.
This is the author’s manuscript of an article originally published in International Journal of Librarianship, volume 5, no. 1, pages 108-127.
Case-Based Learning (CBL) is a popular and successful teaching method used for a long time in disciplines such as medicine, business, law, and computer science. In the past decade, there has been a trend to introduce CBL into library instructions as an active teaching approach in the field of library and information science. Although a few studies have been conducted to investigate the advantages of this teaching technique in the library and information science literature, there remains a substantial absence of first-hand instructional experiences and observations from academic librarians who are actively teaching information literacy. This article presents a personal account of the concept, design, implementation, and assessment of CBL in an information literacy classroom. It discusses the advantages and limitations of CBL, offers suggestions for the future, and points out potential concerns related to the evaluation of workload, librarians’ responsibilities, and the workplace culture. Based on experiences and assessments of CBL classes, the article outlines foreseeable challenges for teaching librarians planning to implement CBL program in information literacy education.
Diao, J. (2021). Instructional design with the ICE approach in academic libraries: A framework that integrates assessing, learning, and teaching.The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 47, Issue 6.
One-shot instruction in academic libraries is a librarian-controlled bibliographic instruction that responds to the point of information need for subject-related courses. The assessment of teaching effectiveness tends to take a summative approach, which provides an answer to what students learned but does not address how they learned. This column theoretically explores the framework of Ideas-Connections-Extensions (ICE) in library instruction and the classroom setting, which demonstrates learning outcomes and explores the learning journey, and integrates assessment, learning, and teaching through collaborative efforts by academic librarians and classroom faculty.
Diao, J., Tzanova, S., Bishop, A. (2021). Wikipedia and Scholarpedia: A comparative case study and its implications to information literacy. Academic Works.
This is the authors’ manuscript of a work originally published in Codex: The Journal of the Louisiana Chapter of the ACRL.
The free online Wikipedia receives increasing attention from academic librarians; however, its counterpart Scholarpedia seems to be neglected. This case study selected two articles bearing the same title Intentionality from Scholarpedia and Wikipedia and brought them under scrutiny of their microstructure and macrostructure. Both microstructure and macrostructure analysis indicated that the addressed readership of the two encyclopedic articles is understandably different in terms of readability and content. The comparative case study concluded with empirical implications that both online, free encyclopedias provide academic librarians with pedagogical instruments to help students engage in authentic knowledge construction.
Hamlett, A. (2021). Getting to work: Information literacy instruction, career courses, and digitally proficient students. Journal of Information Literacy, 15(2), pp.166-177. http://dx.doi.org/10.11645/15.2.2857
This article discusses how following graduation, students often enter the job market unprepared to find, evaluate, and use information in the digital environment effectively. Essentially, there is a disparity between the skills students attain in college coursework, including information literacy (IL) skills, and those required in the workplace, which impacts graduates’ success as new members of the labour market. The article highlights how collaboration between a librarian and an instructor of a career centered course influenced instructional design for IL instruction in their courses. Librarians and instructors will benefit from practical examples from Guttman Community College’s innovative IL Program and the professional courses, get creative ideas for instructional design, and learn new and exciting ways to deliver IL instruction.
Hoyer, J. (2020). Out of the Archives and into the Streets: Teaching with Primary Sources to Cultivate Civic Engagement. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 7 , Article 9. Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol7/iss1/9
This article examines whether teaching with primary sources can cultivate civic engagement by investigating the competencies involved in developing student civic engagement and aligning these with outcomes from teaching with primary sources. Using three examples from Brooklyn Connections, a primary source-based education outreach program that offers a free standards-based and curriculum-aligned school partnership program for grades four through twelve, this case study illustrates the potential for using primary sources to cultivate skills, knowledge, and student agency. Through assessment of these examples in teaching with primary sources using protocols developed for evaluation of programs that focus on developing civic engagement, the author confirms that teaching with primary sources can cultivate civic engagement and narrow an existing civic empowerment gap by teaching skills and knowledge while also providing lifelong social and emotional benefits.
Hoyer, J. (2022). Using a Standards Crosswalk to Adapt Resources for Teaching with Primary Sources Across K–12 and Higher Education. Archival Issues 41(2), p.37–57. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/archivalissues.15610
This article explores the work of archivists and special collections librarians in teaching with primary sources (TPS) for K–12 and higher education audiences and argues that the resources created for this work have largely targeted either audience, but not both. Building on a trend in the TPS literature toward skills-based instruction efforts, this article introduces a crosswalk between skills-based standards typically used in higher education (the SAA/RBMS Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy) and K–12 education (Common Core State Standards). This crosswalk demonstrations how resources created with one audience in mind can be adapted for use with other audiences. Examples of this crosswalk’s application are provided, as well as a discussion of the pitfalls of standards-based learning and the potential of a standards-based crosswalk to open up communication and collaboration around the benefits of teaching with primary sources.
Hoyer, J., Holt, K., Voiklis, J., Attaway, B., & Joy Norlander, R. (2022). Redesigning Program Assessment for Teaching with Primary Sources: Understanding the Impacts of Our Work. The American Archivist, 85(2), 443-479, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.2.443
This article describes how redesigning a program’s assessment practices for teaching with primary sources (TPS) can provide a clear framework for talking about the impact of educators’ work in archives and can provide feedback on how to refine instruction practices for greater results. The authors share a description of their assessment redesign process accompanied by analysis of the implementation of our new assessment tool in the hope others will consider the design and goals of their own assessment practices. The authors’ work demonstrates that reflection on existing tools, development of new goals, and design of new assessment strategies can yield inspiring new data on program impact and highlight areas for improvement. By illustrating the authors’ redesign process, this article also demonstrates the types of impacts and outcomes that educators can measure for TPS and points to the huge potential of TPS in local history contexts and elsewhere. The authors’ revised student assessment moved archives staff from relying on self-reported, affect-focused data to better understanding the outcomes of their work with students: the impact of project-based learning in archives; the value that students find in various aspects of their encounters with archives; the role that TPS in local history contexts plays in connecting students to their community; and the transferability of research skills that students learn through TPS activities.
Johnson, S.C., Bausman, M., & Ward, S.L. (2021). Fostering information literacy: A call for collaboration between academic librarians and MSW instructors. Advances in Social Work, 21(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.18060/24697
Genuine collaboration between academic librarians and social work faculty in which information literacy is embedded in social work education is lacking. Drawing from the results of the authors’ 2016 quantitative study surveying academic social work librarians across the United States, this qualitative follow-up uses data from 27 semi-structured interviews concerning the prevalence and nature of information literacy instruction (ILI) in social work education, how ILI is introduced and sustained in social work curricula, and the alignment between ILI efforts with institutional goals, guidelines from accreditation authorities, and professional social work practice standards. The literature review engages the reader in a robust definition of “information literacy” as applied to social work practice and its connection to social justice and anti-oppressive pedagogy. The findings and subsequent discussion center on current systemic obstacles in ensuring social work graduates enter the profession with sufficient information literacy (IL) skills for an ethical, research-informed, data-driven practice and conclude with recommendations for the evolution of integrated ILI at a local level within social work curricula. Collaborative and sustainable partnerships among academic librarians and social work faculty are essential for educating information literate social work practitioners of tomorrow.
Johnson, S.C., Maher, S. (2020, November 16). Social Work Librarians Promoting Social Justice through Critical Information Literacy. [Presentation]. Academic Works.
The Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education aligns with the Council on Social Work Education’s mission to foster information literate students. Academic librarians discuss how the Framework aligns with social work educational competencies and propose how partnerships with teaching faculty help prepare research-informed students and practitioners.
Jones, W.L., Mastrorilli, T. (2022). Assessing the Impact of an Information Literacy Course on Students’ Academic Achievement: A Mixed-Methods Study. Academic Works. DOI: 10.18438/eblip30090
Objective – The aim of this study is to demonstrate the impact of a stand-alone, credit-bearing information literacy course on retention and GPA for students at an open access urban college.
Methods – Researchers conducted a mixed-methods study with a two-part focus. The first examined the impact of a credit-bearing course using propensity score matching (PSM) techniques to compare academic outcomes for students who participated in the course versus outcomes for similar students who did not enroll in the course. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to measure impact on GPA and performance in 100-level introductory English general education courses. Logistic regression analysis was used to determine persistence one year after enrolling in the course. The second part utilized a questionnaire to survey students of this targeted group to determine impact of the course on their information-seeking behaviour in subsequent academic courses and for non-academic purposes.
Results – The quantitative analyses showed: (a) a higher GPA, though slight, for students who have taken the course over the matched comparison group; (b) an increase in persistence for students who have taken the course over the matched comparison group after one year of taking the course; but (c) lower performance in 100-level introductory English courses by students who have taken the course in contrast to the matched comparison group. Qualitative data provided through the questionnaire revealed positive and substantive reflective statements that support learning outcomes of the course.
Conclusion – The findings in this study underscored the importance of a stand-alone, credit-bearing information literacy course for undergraduate students, particularly for first-generation students attending an open access urban institution. The findings also demonstrate the academic library’s contribution to institutional retention efforts in support of students’ academic success.
Kim, M., Franco, M., & Seo, D. (2020). Implementing Information Literacy (IL) into STEM Writing Courses: Effect of IL Instruction on Students’ Writing Projects at an Urban Community College. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, (94). https://doi.org/10.29173/istl61
The purpose of this study was to implement information literacy (IL) into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) writing courses at an urban community college, investigate if students’ information literacy (IL) skills were improved through library one-shot instruction, and determine if there was an association between IL skills and students’ writing performance. Students in the experimental group attended the library instructional class and students in the control group had no library class. Students’ research papers were scored using the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Information Literacy VALUE Rubric to grade the effectiveness of the library instruction (Association of American Colleges and Universities 2013). While the scores of the papers did not differ between groups, data indicated that there was a statistically significant difference (p = .011) in IL scores between students in the experimental group (M = 9.70) and students in the control group (M = 8.73). The results also showed that information literacy skills were correlated positively with students’ grades on research papers (p = .002).
Lehner-Quam, A., Pitts, W. (2019). Exploring Innovative Ways to Incorporate the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework in Graduate Science Teacher Education ePortfolio Projects. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 25:2-4,357-380, DOI: 10.1080/13614533.2019.1621186
This article investigates ways in which student voice informed design research into information literacy instruction in a year-long graduate science education ePortfolio culminating project. Library and science education faculty partnered in a two-year project to create communities of secondary science education students, in two cohorts, who used the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education to support their own research and reflections into information literacy. The overarching goal was to improve the course design to help science teachers develop their professional competencies in information literacy to conduct research to support their practice. Examination of students’ responses to research experiences enabled faculty to improve the students’ information literacy experience from one year to another. Findings show that students became more familiar with ways to use the ACRL Framework to interrogate their own and their colleagues’ research process as they shared their own reflections on research and information literacy. It was also found that this was fostered by shifts in when and how the ARCL Framework was introduced. Education students can benefit from knowledge of an information literacy framework to impact the way that they conduct their own professional research, work with students on research projects, and participate in scholarly conversations.
McDermott, I. (2022). Evaluating Sources: LaGuardia CC Library. [Lecture or Presentation]. Academic Works.
This presentation is used with students for evaluating sources. It covers the differences between popular, scholarly, and news articles. The information cycle is used to inform students about how and why topics are covered in different publications. The presentation ends with an activity where students read a snippet from a publication and are asked to guess the source.
McDermott, I. (2022). Health Sciences First Year Seminar Library Lesson Plan (HSF90). [Lesson Plan]. Academic Works.
This lesson plan, and accompanying slides, is for the library instruction session for HSF90, LaGuardia Community College’s health sciences first year seminar course. The lesson details the importance of college-level research for students who will enter various health sciences professions. The lesson also covers the importance of citation in academic research, covering what to cite and how to do it using library subscription databases.
Miles, L. & Tappeiner, L. (2023). Pulling it all together: Teaching genre, disciplinary and career literacies, and the Framework for Information Literacy in an associate’s degree capstone course. In H. G. Rempel & R. Hamelers (Eds.), Teaching critical reading skills: Strategies for academic librarians. Chicago: Association of College & Research Libraries.
We team teach a semester-long credit-bearing information literacy course for urban community college students in New York City’s South Bronx. It is a capstone course, designed to support students at the end of their first two years of college as they consider the next stage in their own development, be that transferring to a four-year institution or entering the workforce. For this course, we have constructed an approach to critical reading that combines explicit exploration of academic and disciplinary genres with an investigation into the processes of knowledge production and communication shared by the individuals who produce them. This chapter discusses our approach to the course, describes some example assignments and discussion prompts, and includes what we have learned during the course development phase.
Pearce, L., Lin Hanick, S., Hofer, A., Townsend, L., and Willi Hooper, M. (2022). Your Discomfort Is Valid: Big Feelings and Open Pedagogy. Knowledge Cultures 10(2), 2022, pp. 24-51. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc10220222
This article explores the affective reactions of 13 community college students engaged in an open pedagogy textbook creation project. The instructor and first author, a human development and family services faculty member and department chair at a community college in Oregon, received feedback from her students that the project impacted them differently than past learning experiences. Student engagement with research and the diverse personal experiences of their classmates fostered both personal challenges and growth. This article groups these experiences into themes and explores different theoretical lenses, including scaffolding (constructivism), transformative learning, threshold concepts and safe spaces/brave spaces. We discuss the support that students and faculty can use in similar learning situations, such as metacognition and cultural humility. Finally, we offer a visual model that open educators can use and adapt to consider how to raise or lower the stakes of an open pedagogy assignment.
Polger, M.A. (2021, February 19). 3-2-1-Action: Transitioning to Teaching Online and Synchronously in a 7 Week Information Literacy Class. [Presentation].
This work was presented at the 2021 LACUNY Dialogues, “Can you all hear me…I think you muted yourself”: Learning to Work in a Remote Age and Staying Sane.
Prince, N. (2023). What’s art got to do with politics? Show me the evidence. College & Research Libraries News, 84(1), 7. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.84.1.7
Faculty expect students to integrate appropriate sources for their assignments with a research component and rely on collaborations with library subject specialists to support student needs. Teaching students to build their information literacy skills by using the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education contributes to increasing their proficiency for college-level research. Aspects important to this endeavor are learning about academic literature, choosing topics and learning background information, and finding and evaluating sources. Students learn how to construct their own academic authority, how to insert themselves into the ongoing scholarly conversation, and that searching can be nonlinear and iterative. Collaboration with course faculty encourages students who tend to shy away from the library. Avoiding the library is not uncommon for students, who then struggle alone with elements of their assignment that require research help. Hence the classroom visibility of subject specialist work builds student awareness of the library and prompts them to be proactive when doing library research.
Prince, N. (2023). Insights: Qualitative Study to Reevaluate and Redesign Online Learning Self-Guided Tools for English First Year Writers Learning Self-Guided Tools for English First Year Writers. Academic Works.
This article was originally published in the Christian Librarian.
The library faculty teaches approximately three hundred one-time instructional classes per year. This study explored the role of the library instructor in support of serving the needs of first-year writers (FYW) in a discourse community (DC). The English faculty teach English Composition I, the FYW develop their writing skills in a community with shared goals and an established means of communicating. This qualitative study explored: (1) in-depth experiences of the English faculty during library one-time instructional classes; (2) their perceptions of what students need most, in the new curriculum; (3) new findings that would guide the design of digital tools to further support students’ academic success. The study aimed to analyze the data using thematic coding. Results indicated that there were many priorities for a seventy-five-minute, one-time instructional library class. Therefore, there was a need for digital tools to extend the resources available to students to improve their acquisition of information literacy skills. In conclusion, the study highlighted the English faculty perspective of what their students need from the one-time instructional sessions. The research was unintentionally conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore teaching and learning took place remotely. The author gained invaluable insights to the development of digital learning tools.
Richards, M. (2021). Is “Just Googling It” Good Enough for First-Year Students? College & Undergraduate Libraries, 28:1, 85-104, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2021.1894295
This study analyzes citations by first-year students to determine what content they were citing and whether it was available through the open web or the library. Examining the role of these two places as content providers for academic work fills a gap in the literature. Most of the cited works were available through the library and the open web. As the line between content providers continues to blur, these results can help academic libraries prioritize what to teach students about information literacy, where to focus collection development efforts and how to promote the discovery of library resources.
Shirazi, R., & Cirasella, J. (2020). Librarians in dissertation deposit: Infusing an institutional ritual with scholarly communication instruction. In C. Forbes & P. Keeran (Eds.), Academic library services for graduate students: Supporting future academics and professionals. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.
Most doctoral students are required to produce a dissertation that makes an original contribution to their field of study in order to fulfill their degree requirements. The scholarly nature of this requirement informs how students and faculty approach doctoral research, but universities often treat the dissertations themselves merely as student records, not scholarly contributions. Librarians, however, are uniquely situated to work with graduate students as emerging participants in the scholarly communication ecosystem and help them prepare their dissertations for an outside audience. Librarians have the expertise to advise students with questions regarding copyright, licensing, fair use, and authors’ rights, as well as the awareness to spot such issues even when students are not aware of them.
The importance of treating graduate students as scholarly contributors was made evident when our institution, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, moved responsibility for dissertation deposit from an administrative role to a librarian position. In this chapter, we offer as a case study our experience transforming the deposit process into a scholarly communication consultation with a copyright-literate librarian. We also provide prompts for considering ways to insert librarian-led scholarly communication consultations into the graduation checklist, regardless of which office manages dissertation deposit.
Stadler, D., Conyers, D.G. (2020). Advancing College Students’ Thesis Writing Ability: A Case Study of an Online Library Instruction Course. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Innovative Pedagogy, vol. 2, Fall 2020, pp. 39-53, https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=sotl_ip.
The following case study adapted a library instruction course to support students’ ability to construct a thesis statement. Given at an urban junior college, the goal of the credit-bearing course is for students to acquire effective research strategies for finding reliable information and to develop information literacy skills. For this study, pedagogy divided thesis writing development over the course of several weeks in which students reviewed sample theses and the work of their peers, providing feedback to fellow students and revising their own work based on feedback from both students and instructors. The class section in this study utilized Blackboard instructional technology for both lessons and assignments, and did not meet face-to-face. In an effort to simulate active learning in a virtual environment, the instructors prepared a form of think-pair-share for students to review and comment on each other’s work. To review thesis statements, both students and the instructors utilized a set of questions aimed at examining the effectiveness of the argument. Results of the study will determine whether students improved thesis writing ability. It will also establish whether feedback, both from their peers and from instructors, helped students revise their thesis, and if think-pair-share was successful in an online environment.
Stadler, D., Rojas, A. (2019). Supporting Institutional Objectives by Embedding Mission-Critical Competencies in Credit-Bearing Library Instruction: A Review and Case Study. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 25:2-4, 171-189, DOI: 10.1080/13614533.2019.1616307
This article reviews scholarship of incorporating institutional objectives in academic courses and proposes a method to embed mission-critical competencies in a library instruction course. Few academic institutions focus their mission or core competencies on digital communication. LaGuardia Community College delineates three competencies in its mission: inquiry and problem solving, global learning, and integrative learning. Students exhibit command of these competencies in written, oral, or digital communication. The College defines the digital communication ability as successful collaboration and interaction using online tools, such as discussion boards, either to stage written exchange, or to capture video or oral discussions. Through participation in a campus initiative to align assignments with digital communication, the authors embedded this unique online ability in a credit-bearing library instruction course that focuses on information literacy. The updated midsemester examination prompts students to interact and critically evaluate contributions made by their peers in a guided online discussion. Specifically, students comment on another student’s annotated bibliography and determine whether their peers communicated an arguable claim and evidence to support it. To argue that digital communication strengthens information literacy skills, the authors completed a small case study.
Su, D. (2022). Coping with Constant Obsolescence: A Lifelong Task. International Journal of Librarianship, 7(2), 147–154. https://doi.org/10.23974/ijol.2022.vol7.2.256
This work was originally published in the International Journal of Librarianship.
Knowledge and skill obsolescence is a common obstacle in individual, organization, and society development. Thanks to the modern technologies, the rate of obsolescence accelerates rapidly in the information age. In the library workplace, obsolescence occurs constantly. We may be used to routines, but changes are inevitable as we have witnessed the evolution in library services and librarian workplace since the advent of the internet. To cope with obsolescence, it is crucial to have a lifelong learning mindset, make it a habit, and find ways to update our knowledge and skills to stay competent and serve the clientele effectively.
Walker, Leila. Intimacy and Interruption in Remote Library Instruction. Hybrid Pedagogy. April 9, 2021. https://hybridpedagogy.org/intimacy-and-interruption-in-remote-library-instruction-2/
Sharing our spaces in synchronous instruction sessions does more than just show the places where research occurs. It creates an opportunity for students to see our vulnerabilities.
Ward, L., Byas, T., Cercone, A., Lynch, B.L., Wentrack, K. (2020). Collaborative Assignments and Projects: Interdisciplinary Collaborative Assignments and Projects: Case Studies in Information Literacy and Higher Order Thinking Skills. Academic Works.
This work was originally published in “The Engaged Library: High-Impact Educational Practices in Academic Libraries,” edited by Joan D. Ruelle.
In their efforts to assist and enhance student learning, Queensborough’s faculty engages in developing and implementing various pedagogical innovations. One unique practice at Queensborough is Students Working in Interdisciplinary Groups (SWIG), a HIP that falls within the AAC&U designation of Collaborative Assignments and Projects, which incorporates collaboration with library faculty as an integral component to student learning. This chapter will explain the SWIG pedagogy and process, faculty collaboration with the QCC library, its replicable model, case studies, and assessment.
Wengler, S.T., Wolff-Eisenberg, C. (2020). Community College Librarians and the ACRL Framework: Findings from a National Study. Academic Works.
This is the submitted version of an article published in College and Research Libraries.
This study explored community college librarians’ engagement with the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. A national online survey with 1,201 community college librarian respondents reveals limited familiarity with and integration of the Framework into community college instruction to date. Findings indicate an openness to future adoption, as well as substantial interest in targeted professional development and a version of the Framework adapted for community college campuses. These results contribute benchmark instructional data on an understudied section of academic librarianship and add to the growing body of research on how librarians have updated teaching practices in response to the Framework.