Focus Groups Spur New LTS
Initiatives
A few days before the project/paper is
due, students often wonder: Where do you go after Google?
What’s wrong (and right!) with Wikipedia? How do you cite
sites?
Over the last two years faculty members
in ten departments across the colleges have participated in
focus groups designed to gain a clearer understanding of
what discipline-specific competencies in the skilled and
ethical use of information faculty expect from their
graduating students.
Organized
by LTS Client Services librarians, groups were held with
faculty in the following departments: Accounting, Biology,
Chemical Engineering, Earth and Environmental Sciences,
English, International Relations, Marketing, Materials
Science , Political Science and Psychology. A separate
session was held for English Department Teaching Assistants.
These sessions, facilitated by Greg
Skutches, Coordinator for Writing across the Curriculum, and
Judd Hark, Instructional Technologist, were quite successful
in identifying important current needs and challenges. Dr.
Skutches noted that, as a side benefit, he gained some new
insights into challenges associated with writing
assignments. Many findings have been addressed as of fall
2008 with the new initiatives described below.
1. Need for instruction in appropriate
citation of sources.
Students often do not understand when or how to cite
sources. Sometimes there is also a cultural overlay of
differing citation practice in different countries.
Robust citation management software can
be very useful to students in addressing this challenge so
LTS has now purchased a RefWorks site license that all
faculty and students can use. Please contact Jean Johnson at
jj04@lehigh.edu, or x84889 for more information about
RefWorks.
2. Need for information instruction to be delivered in
the context of required assignments.
As a practical matter, students very
seldom devote time or energy to learning about library
resources or developing research skills in advance of an
immediate need for them. Librarians are volunteering to be
“embedded” in classes through participation in the course
Blackboard environment.
They will offer online Q&A that can be
reviewed by students as they proceed with their assignments.
In addition librarians will be active members of the new
Teaching Research and Communications (TRAC) Fellows program
(visit website
here) this fall, assisting the student fellows in
developing high competency levels in information literacy
themselves and in learning techniques for transmitting these
skills to the students they tutor.
3. Need for broader instruction in and
about disciplinary
databases, Google, and Wikipedia.
Faculty members agree that students generally begin all
research assignments with Google searches and sometimes they
limit their research to sources discovered through Google or
Wikipedia. Recent publications and resources tend to be
favored over seminal articles and other works simply because
they are listed first in the results from dominant search
strategies.
Students clearly need to understand the
quality limitations of Google and Wikipedia, but they also
often lack skill in searching these popular resources
effectively. This is what librarians will seek to address
through their embedded presence in the Blackboard course
page, invitations from faculty to offer class sessions in
disciplinary databases and resources, the LTS seminar
series, the TRAC program, consulting hours at the libraries,
online services, and other evolving mechanisms.
This is just the beginning of
strengthening information literacy at Lehigh in
collaboration with Lehigh University’s faculty. Librarians
look forward to a continuing conversation with these and
other departments so that the goal of graduating information
literate undergraduates and graduate students can be met and
maintained in the rapidly changing global information
environment.
For more information contact Roseann
Bowerman, Client Services Team Leader for the College of
Arts and Sciences and coordinator of the LTS Working Group
on Information Literacy, at rb04@lehigh.edu, or x83053. An
Information Literacy web site is located
here.
--Susan A. Cady
LTS Director for Administrative and Planning Services
Article posted September
12,
2008
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