10 Ways to Improve Student Research

When you ready to revise or create syllabi for upcoming courses, check out this newly created resource.
Based on the data from a large national survey of undergraduate research behavior, the guide offer tips to help you to help your students succeed with research based projects : http://guides.library.unlv.edu/improve_research

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.

 

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.

Helping students learn to read journal articles

This article from Inside Higher Ed offers some excellent guidance is offered for how we can help students learn to read good sources...
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/instant_mentor/essay_on_teaching_students_to_read_journal_articles

Students are writing but don't have anything to say...?

Two researchers reporting at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication said that students “...are not selecting authoritative, meaningful sources and not reading them carefully. They are not, in a word, engaging.” 164 student research papers (with 1,832 research citations) produced in first-year composition classes were analyzed. Institutions in 12 states from diverse regions of the country, including community colleges and four-year public universities, private colleges and universities, and religiously affiliated and Ivy league institutions were represented.
"Only 9 percent of the citations were categorized as summary [ as opposed to quotes, paraphrasing or patchwriting]. 'That's the stunning part, I think: 91 percent are citations to material that isn't composing,' said Jamieson. 'They don't digest the ideas in the material cited and put it in their own words.' "
Read a fuller report of their findings in today's (April 11) Inside Higher Ed.

National survey finds college students lack basic research skills

The newest in a series of studies and reports from Project Information Literacy is summarized in today's (Nov. 10, 2010) Chronicle of Higher Ed. I wanted to highlight just a couple of their findings that I can attest to based on my own years of experience working with student researchers...

"Alison J. Head, a co-principal investigator for the project, said the results suggest that today’s students... [are]basically taking how they learned to research in high school with them to college, since it’s worked for them in the past... findings show that college students approach research as a hunt for the right answer instead of a process of evaluating different arguments and coming up with their own interpretation.  'Not being aware of the diverse resources that exist or the different ways knowledge is created and shared is dangerous.' she said. 'College is a time to find information and learn about multiple arguments, and exploring gets sacrificed if you conduct research in this way.'”

Searching for better researchers

Today's (Sept. 29) Inside Higher Ed had this article, "Searching for better research habits," describing a couple of presentations at the recent Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference.  I couldn't agree more with those interviewed that we need to be teaching students concepts of research, not just how to use the tools. Google's Daniel M. Russell, a senior research scientist for search quality, said, "One of the things we have to do is not teach the little twiddlybits about search...Technical knowledge of... search interface ... becomes obsolete, because the interfaces are constantly changing. So I don’t want to teach them algorithms...I don’t want to teach them what’s in the index and all that stuff...I do want to teach them what’s possible.” In other words: If students do not know what is out there to find, they cannot search for it effectively.

Research assignments short on the "how to"

A new report from Project Information Literacy, "How Handouts for Research Assignments Guide Today's College Students," finds that although product mechanics are provided, very little information or guidance helps students with locating and using sources in the conduct of research. Project Directors Head and Eisenberg did a "content analysis of 191 course-related research assignment handouts distributed to undergraduates on 28 college campuses across the U.S." Faculty often make some unwarranted assumptions about college students ability to locate and identify appropriate sources of information.

According to an article in CHE today, "The study found that 83 percent of assignment handouts called for a standard individual research paper, as opposed to alternatives such as collaborative, oral, or multimedia projects. Ms. Head and Mr. Eisenberg analyzed handouts for the diversity of their suggested sources, combing them for recommendations of library resources, course readings, primary sources, and the Internet as elements in the research process."

Dr. Head is quoted as saying, ""I think this study gives professors an opportunity to question whether they're accomplishing what they want to do with their handouts and whether, if they included different details, it might give them better research papers at the end of the day."

Education, not fear, found effective in reducing plagiarism

Inside Higher Ed had an article on a randomized control group study which looked at the impact of a tutorial focused on educating students about academic integrity. The students did not know they were part of a study, but those who viewed the tutorial evidenced less plagiarism in papers; however the "treated" students did not report a higher level of concern about committing or being caught for plagiarizing than did the control group, suggesting that fear was not a motivating factor. The full article is here. The "Plagiarism Resource Site" was created jointly by Colby, Bates and Bowdoin .

Models of Information Inquiry

I just ran across this rich web site that brings together information on multiple models of teaching and learning inquiry and research skills for all ages. Created by the School of Library and Information Science at IUPUI (Indiana Univ. Purdue Univ @ Indiana) there are bibliographies of additional reading on almost every "model" page. Potentially a great resource for K-12 educators. Includes the Big 6 and Super 3, I-Search, Pathways to Knowledge, WebQuest, InfoZone, Kuhlthau's Information Seeking Process (one of my favorites), and more.