Here's a short video featuring quotes from the iSchool's Project Information Literacy research project. PIL studies undergraduate students' academic and everyday research habits. UW was one of the participating schools. [DLR]

Brainstorm!

Thanks to all who came to Monday's Quarterly Instruction Roundtable. We had a great session about brainstorming! Kathleen Collins kickstarted the discussion by leading the group through a brainstorming session & also shared some interesting tips on idea generation from the Thinkertoys book. Personally, I cannot wait to try the paper airplane exercise...

Step 1: Have students write a topic idea on sheets of paper;
Step 2: Make the sheets of paper into airplanes;
Step 3: Students sail their ideas around the classroom;
Step 4: Each student then collects an airplane, adds an idea to the sheet, refolds & resails;
Step 5: Repeat as necessary. At the end of the exercise, everyone has a list of several ideas.

For those of you who might've missed this great discussion, fear not! There will be a roundtable at the end of winter quarter, as well.

Quick thinks

I just attended a workshop on small group learning, where the facilitator introduced the 'quick think', a short activity which can be integrated into a lecture, demonstration, or other instructional method. Some of these might be particularly effective in our quick one-shot sessions where we're often looking for quick but meaningful activities to make our sessions more effective and engaging.

Check out this article for a concise outline of a few 'quick thinks'. Have you used any version of these techniques in your own teaching? Do tell! Do these spark any new ideas for class sessions that you have coming up? We want to hear! [EK]

Practical pedagogy fall quarter events

Practical Pedagogy is a graduate student colloquium that brings together teachers from the University of Washington community to discuss strategies for putting their pedagogical values into practice.

*Special faculty guest: Dr. Anne Beaufort, UW Tacoma
"They Don't Do The Reading: How to Get Students Engaged with Texts"
Thursday October 16, 3:30-5:00, CMU 202

Students come to college experts in reading Facebook, blogs, text messages, email. When students are assigned whole books, textbooks, or difficult articles, the skills they have don't serve them well. Nor do they feel motivated to read. What can we do? In this workshop, we'll look at ways to engage analytical reading skills and to motivate reading other than through the proverbial quiz. Bring a text that students will read this quarter, or one from past or future courses.

Dr. Anne Beaufort, of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences College at UW Tacoma, teaches writing and coaches graduate students in surviving the thesis/dissertation process. She holds a Ph.D. in Education, with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Stanford University.

"Using Pocket Technology to Teach Interviewing Skills"
Thursday November 20, 3:30-5:00, CMU 226

The various technologies carried in the pockets of most of our undergraduates can be harnessed to teach interviewing skills or to incorporate interviewing into a class assignment. Through the use of file conversion web sites, the instructor may download and then listen to these interviews—later meeting with the student to review specific portions for praise and improvement. This technique of using digital recorders, cameras or phones for recording an interview eliminates the fear factor for most students. It also allows the instructor to easily access the file both for assessment and for review with the students. Facilitator: Peg Achterman (Communication).

Call us!

Dottie Smith shared this idea from the recent Reference Renaissance Conference. During your instruction sessions, when you're telling students how they can contact the Libraries when they have questions, have them pull out their cell phones and add the Info Desk number to their phonebook (206-543-0242). Great idea! [EK]

Lunch Discussion Notes: Assessment & Undergraduates

Here are the notes from one of the lunch discussion groups at our recent Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop. The topic of this discussion was: Assessment & Undergraduates

Thanks to John Holmes for moderating this discussion!

• We need to take a more systematic approach to UG assessment. Too much random and redundant instruction with no developmental arc. The role of the librarian as advocate is the key to articulating outcomes, both in general education curricula and within disciplines.


• Library outcomes need to be aligned with institutional curricula. And the vocabularies we use to discuss with faculty and administrators need to be customizable and built upon common goals.
• Scalability is the single biggest challenge to UG assessment.
• Undergrads seem to be more task-oriented than graduates, who are more career- and discipline-focused. Outcomes need to be more granular.
• Pre- and post-testing UGs seems to build higher motivation and confidence.
• Assessment is a strong marketing and advocacy tool. Faculty response to instruction by librarians can be used to broaden reach of programs.
• UGs should build a repertoire of approaches to solving information problems. Changes in technology change problem-solving strategies, which should, in turn, change our approaches to assessment.
• Perhaps the most important outcome, one that can be addressed both by librarians and course instructors, is increased metacognition in learners. The habit of reflecting on their own learning leads to better questions, better mental models, and more self-directed learning.

Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Ithaka, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of technology in higher education, has published an in-depth white paper with analysis and results from faculty and librarian surveys. The faculty survey focused on the relationship between faculty and their campus library, faculty dependence on electronic scholarly resources for research and teaching, the transition from print to electronic for scholarly journals, faculty publishing preferences, e-books, digital institutional repositories, and the preservation of scholarly journals. The librarian survey focused on the role of the library on the modern campus, impressions about electronic resources, digital institutional repositories, and the preservation of scholarly journals. Links to the raw data for both the faculty and librarian studies are also available. See http://www.ithaka.org/research/faculty-and-librarian-surveys

Assessment workshop opening remarks

Introductory comments by Anne Zald, Head, Map Collection & Cartographic Information Services at the University of Washington Libraries, and member of the ACRL Institute for Information Literacy Immersion faculty.

Lunch Discussion Notes: Assessment techniques (Regardless of Technology)

Here are the notes from one of the lunch discussion groups at our recent Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop.

The topic of this discussion was: Assessment Techniques (regardless of technology) Thanks to Deb Raftus for moderating this discussion!

Some assessment techniques our group has made use of:

• In-class worksheets with exercises
• Clickers
• End of session satisfaction surveys
• Clear/muddy questions
• End of quarter online form (low response)
• One-minute papers
• Zoho is helpful to provide structure for reporting instruction assessment to administrators (for departmental reporting of assessment results, including stats, strategies used, and informal notes)
• Reflection: one minute papers, research log
• Pre and Post testing -Serves to learn what students know, as well as clue them in that there are things they don't know
• Pre - class surveys of resource knowledge or research strategies: should be anonymous to encourage honesty, also reassure students that you aren't looking for a "right answer."

Individual Challenges:

• Finding assessment techniques that are appropriate for returning students (or graduate students) -- don't want to come off as condescending or insulting.

• Getting students to recognize value of Reference materials...how to assess use? Solution: Mark books and count for use as they are photocopied through Libraries photocopy services.

• If you use a lot of informal assessment strategies, how do you measure and report the results? Recommendations: Incorporate solutions where you can collect results (WebQ, have students email an article citation to you, get bibliographies and/or final projects from faculty, follow up with faculty to see if students found appropriate sources)

• How to find out what students own approach is to research, before teaching them, for the purpose of learning where they start. (How to ask in away that they will be honest?) This will help understand where they are coming from, but could also impact our reference and instruction services.

• How to change mid-class based on evaluation/assessment?

• How to assess students' comfort with technology before the course, in the case of an online course where technology has proven to be a barrier to student learning. Students were reluctant to ask for help during the course, so it would help to find out where students are stumbling before the class, to find alternative ways to provide the information, and assist users in a way that they are comfortable with. (Perhaps survey could also address their learning styles, how they like to learn new technologies?)

Lunch discussion Notes: Learning Outcomes

Here are the notes from one of the lunch discussion groups at our recent Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop.

The topic of this discussion was: Learning Outcomes. Thanks to Emily Keller for moderating this discussion!

• Is there a disconnect between the information literacy standards and developmental outcomes? How do we move beyond so much focus on the lower order skills in Bloom’s taxonomy? We may undermine students’ extant capabilities and experiences by only showing them tools, rather than tapping into the other skills and experiences they bring to the classroom.

• Experiments using homework, or interactive pre-library session worksheets, to prepare students before their first library session in a class. Helps bring students up to a certain level and ensure that they’ve already covered some basics, without taking up more class time. Instructors distribute the non-graded 20-minute homework assignment. Plans to build on this work and add a post-test to measure progress through the quarter.

• Struggle with translating the broader institutional outcomes into information literacy outcomes in the classroom. Examples and questions:

• An English department has learning outcomes for their writing classes. How do they ensure consistency of outcomes when instructors have such discretion to teach in their own way?

• If information literacy outcomes are already in a program’s objectives, what’s the next step? Working with individual instructors? How does the program assess those outcomes?

• Challenging to frame information literacy outcomes when working with professional, vocational, and technical programs.

• Instructors want us to teach so much in a one-shot session. Perhaps we can use learning outcomes as a tool for talking with instructors about their course goals, specific competencies that they’d like to see, where they see problems, and using that as starting point to talk about what’s realistic in a one-shot session. It can also be a way to frame what we have to offer in terms of helping instructors achieve THEIR course goals, rather than trying to get time in a class where the instructor doesn’t want to take more time away from the syllabus. Explaining how we’ve found active learning activities to be far more effective in fostering student learning that they will retain and apply, and that will take X amount of time for Z learning outcome. Learning outcomes create new ways to step into the discussion, instead of approaching library instruction as an add-on.

• What about collaboration, engagement, and group work as learning outcomes in themselves? Not just processes or activities, but as the very learning that you’re trying to foster? In one instance, group activities fostered engagement that the librarian and instructor now pursue that as a goal itself.

• Variety of activities to foster better articulation between community college and upper division information literacy outcomes.

• E-portfolios, integrating info lit objectives into the curriculum which we would then expect to see in summative student products such as portfolios.

Lunch Discussion Notes: Assessment Tools & Technology

Here are the notes from one of the lunch discussion groups at our recent Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop.

The topic of this discussion was: Assessment Tools & Technology. Thanks to Jennifer Fairchild for moderating this discussion!

Favorite Tools:

• Game Show Software (about $350) and Who’s First (buzzers, about $150). Both are available through Trainer’s Warehouse. http://www.trainerswarehouse.com/default.asp
• TurningPoint Audience Response System, the clickers and the software. http://www.turningtechnologies.com/

Available Tools:

• Survey Monkey: free version and paid
• Quia: includes surveys, quizzes, html coding, web pages, tutorial, games, classroom management. Can be open source or password protected. http://www.quia.com/web
• Blackboard: http://www.blackboard.com/inpractice/highered/index.bb
• Moodle: open source http://moodle.org/
• ANGEL: many higher education institutions are replacing Blackboard with ANGEL http://www.angellearning.com/
  
• E-Portfolio: http://www.eportfolio.org/
• Online Faculty Learning Commons
• WebQ/Catalyst
• “real life” tools (i.e. the catalog or websites) used to compare sources or locate items during a class session for example

Impediments to our instruction and assessment:

• Budget cuts
• Limited classroom time, how do we fit instruction and assessment into one short session with a class?

What could be improved?:

• Resource sharing! It would be wonderful if all of the library communities of Washington State could easily access and share instruction (i.e. online tutorials) and assessment tools with colleagues so that the wheel is not being reinvented over and over again.

Putting Assessment into Practice: Resources

We currently have two sources for additional articles and web sites regarding instruction and information literacy assessment:

del.icio.us: Assessment4Librarians bookmarks - http://delicious.com/assessment4librarians

RefWorks: shared folder - Assessment for Librarians
-- or, if you don't have access to RefWorks, a static page of current resources has been posted at http://faculty.washington.edu/elcoe/assessmentreferences.htm

Putting Assessment into Practice: a Library Instruction Workshop

Sponsored by the Instruction & Information Literacy Working Group at the University of Washington Libraries, this hands-on workshop is for librarians who want to better understand what their students know before, during, and after library instruction sessions. The workshop will introduce accessible concepts, techniques, and technologies for implementing classroom assessment in any setting.

Date: August 18, 2008

Time: 8:30am to 3:00pm

Location: University of Washington, Seattle campus, Mary Gates Hall (MGH) (campus map)

Agenda

8:30-9:00 Check-in and coffee/pastries (MGH 228)

9:00 - 9:30 Welcome and Introductory comments (MGH 228)

Anne Zald, Head, Map Collection & Cartographic Information Services at the University of Washington Libraries, and member of the ACRL Institute for Information Literacy Immersion faculty

9:45 -10:45 Tools for Learning What your Students Have Learned: Outcomes for Classroom Assessment (MGH 228)

Margy Lawrence, Center for Instructional Development and Research (CIDR), University of Washington

11:00 - 12:00 Catalyst WebQ: Applications of Survey Tools for Information Literacy Learning Assessment (MGH Computer Classroom)

Deb Raftus, Romance Languages and Literatures Librarian, University of Washington Libraries, and Catalyst staff.

12:15 - 1:15 Lunch (MGH Commons)

Seeded small group informal discussion. Participants can choose a table/topic that interests them. Topics will be Learning outcomes, assessment tools (technology), assessment techniques (regardless of technology), Working with undergraduates, Working with graduates.

1:30-2:30 Click! Click! in the Classroom: Quick Assessment of Student Learning Using an Audience Response System (MGH Computer Classroom)

Janet Schnall, Information Management Librarian, Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington

2:30 - 3:00 Wrap up (MGH Computer Classroom)

John Holmes, Undergraduate Services Librarian, Odegaard Undergraduate Library, University of Washington

Welcome

Welcome to the UW Instruction & Information Literacy blog! Have a question about an upcoming instruction session? Want to keep up to date on InfoLit? Then this is the place!

This blog is maintained by the University of Washington Libraries Instruction and Information Literacy Working Group for the benefit of all instruction librarians everywhere.