Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Learning Styles: A Common Misconception?

This video by neuroscientist/cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham (U. of Virginia) suggests teachers do NOT need to change what they do to accommodate different learning styles...
Then there was this article from the Dec. 15, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students." Quoting Pashler and colleagues, "We were startled to find that there is so much research published on learning styles, but that so little of the research used experimental designs that had the potential to provide decisive evidence." They are not asserting that people don't have preferences, but that those preferences are not the primary driver of how well students learn. In fact, different types of material are more effectively taught in different ways, and the important teaching strategy is to determine that--i.e., "matching style with content"--rather than  accommodating multiple student learning styles. Learning styles advocate and researcher Robert Sternberg disagrees with their conclusions, but David Kolb, one of the earliest proponents of learning styles, "says that the paper's bottom line is probably correct: There is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their students' particular learning styles."

All this consideration was prompted by a recent (Aug. 29, 2011) piece on NPR's "Morning Edition." "Think You'e an Auditory or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely" revisits both the Pasher, et al. literature review and the work by Willingham to conclude that the evidence just isn't there.
What do you think and teach about using learning styles in the classroom?

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

APA clarifies its position on providing data to "discovery" tools

According to Linde Beebe, Senior Director of PsycInfo, in the latest issue of PsycInfo News (Aug. 2011):
"To clarify what appears to be confusing and even misleading information in the marketplace, we wish to make it absolutely clear what APA content is available through discovery services.
APA has not provided any metadata from PsycINFO® to any service, nor does the organization have any plans to do so at this time. With more than 3.1 million records from as early as 1597, PsycINFO is the only source for literature that covers the breadth and depth of psychology and related disciplines...

Comparing search results for common psychological constructs in PsycINFO with those in discovery services very quickly demonstrates the dramatic difference in what the searches yield. Any claims to the contrary in discovery service sales and marketing communications should be viewed with skepticism.
Researchers and students with no access to PsycINFO will miss a very large percentage of content in almost any area. And they will not have the advantages of the precision PsycINFO offers them in refining their search. The only way to get the content in PsycINFO is through a site license or purchase of a daily pass.
Metadata only for APA's full-text databases PsycARTICLES®... currently are included in the indexes of four major discovery services:
  • EBSCO Discovery Service from EBSCO
  • Primo from Ex Libris
  • Summon from Serials Solutions [the one being used at UNLV Libraries]
  • WorldCat Local from OCLC
APA has collaborated with these services to enable our customers to find full text more easily. Our agreements with the services stipulate that users will link from the services to our full text only if they are authorized users of an institution that has a current APA site license agreement...
We have collaborated with discovery services to provide an additional service to our customers for full text. In no way, however, should our collaboration be viewed as a potential replacement for the APA databases themselves."

So, just a reminder that, although Summon will find lots of material, it doesn't search everything!

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Digital Etiquette policies in the classroom

You've all run into problems I'm guessing with students inappropriately using technology in the classroom so I thought you might be interested in this short discussion and sample policy in today's "Chronicle."  I especially liked this suggestion from the "Comments" that followed the article,
"After hearing a few students walking across campus engaged in a bitter analysis of a professor who banned laptops, I now ask my students, each semester, to devise their own policy on classroom etiquette (including: cell phones, laptops, eating, talking while others are talking, responding to those with whom they disagree, lateness--mine or theirs). This works much better than imposing rules, for students discover that other students are in the majority very disapproving of classroom incivilities. For example, students dislike the smell and crackling of food, the spilling of drinks, the distractions of laptop screens tuned to non-class materials, and the rude, distracting behavior of students and teachers who arrive late for class. Peer consensus is always far more powerful and persuasive than a teacher's impositions and, to my surprise, students are always more conservative than I would be."


Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education published

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education in 2000, which were subsequently incorporated into many accrediting bodies' benchmarks. Since that time, work has been underway to develop discipline specific standards, and those for teacher education have just been published. "The Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education provides a bridge between the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2000) and the application of the information literacy standards in teacher education contexts" (Cook & Cooper, 2006).
According to the committee that drafted and revised the standards,
"The main purposes of the Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education are to:
  • Guide teacher education faculty and instruction librarians in developing information literacy instruction for teacher education students.
  • Enable the evaluation and assessment of such instruction and curricula through benchmarking outcomes.
Secondarily, the Standards aim to communicate to teacher education students expectations for information literacy knowledge and skills they need to develop and apply in their academic work and pre-service teaching. The Standards also aim to lead teacher education students to consider how they might integrate information literacy into their future curriculum, instruction, and assessment activities once a member of the teaching profession." (http://crln.acrl.org/content/72/7/420.full)

Cook, D. & Cooper, N. (Eds.) (2006). Teaching information literacy to social sciences students and practitioners: A casebook of applications. Chicago: ACRL.

Monday, August 22, 2011

What students don't know...

You may already have seen this article in today's Inside Higher Ed, which reminds me of several things:
  • We (faculty & librarians) assume our students know more about researching than they actually do.
  • Most students have no idea what librarians do or how they can help with research based projects.
  • Faculty teaching classes are the key to bridging the gap in terms of helping students find their way to librarians and library resources.
ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) is a multi-institution, ethnographic study of student research behavior, conducted in collaboration with anthropology faculty. Researchers "were surprised by the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.”
Hopefully, as the new term starts, we can work together to help your students become better critical consumers and users of information.

ERIC database updates

While at the national library conference this summer, I attended a session on the ERIC database and thought I would share some bits of interesting data:
  • There are over  1.4 million records including 892 thousand journal records, of which 336 thousand are full-text.
  • They index 1063 journals comprehensively (i.e., cover to cover) and an additional 100+ titles are indexed selctively
  • They are collaborating with ProQuest (vendor) to provide links to the full text of dissertations and they are adding ERIC indexing terms to the records. This is huge as dissertation indexing (and hence searching) has been very primitive in the past.
  • They add 4 thousand new records to the database every month. 
  • The updates appear daily in the government's web site (eric.ed.gov) and monthly in the other vendors' versions (e.g., Ebsco)