Faculty: William B. Scott, James Burnell, Pamela Frese, Arnold C. Lewis, Robert Varga
Librarians: Julia Gustafson, Electronic Services Librarian
Jeff Pinkham, Reference Associate
Damon Hickey, Director of Libraries
Margo Warner Curl, Technical Services Librarian
Christen Cardina, Information Literacy Coordinator
Overview. The development of instructional tools for information literacy within the College of Wooster's First Year Seminar Program is proposed. A variety of models will be pursued in developing materials and assignments that will be measured in effectiveness by the extent to which students exposed to the instruction achieve goals outlined in both 1) The College of Wooster's list of First-Year Library Research Goals and 2) the Information Literacy Competency Standards developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
Narrative
Introduction Wooster's First Year Seminars in Critical Inquiry (FYS)
provide the perfect staging ground for the development of instructional tools
for information literacy. All entering first year students enroll in a seminar
group of approximately 15 students. The Seminars focus upon the process of critical
inquiry in a writing-intensive class. These classes are designed to enhance
intellectual skills essential for liberal learning and for successful participation
in the College's academic program. The students engage with a set of issues,
questions, or ideas which can be illuminated by the disciplinary and interdisciplinary
perspectives of the liberal arts. Each Seminar is designed and taught by a faculty
member who also serves as the academic adviser to the students in that Seminar,
and each seminar is an exploration of a different topic. Some of this year's
seminar titles include: Life in the City (J. Burnell), Interpretations of Historic
Time: Museums and Tourist Sites in Cultural Context (P. Frese), Poor People's
Campaigns and their Consequences (A. Lewis), Aggression and Violence (W. Scott),
and Myths, Legends, and Earth Science of the Mediterranean Region (R. Varga),
among others.
The seminars are writing-intensive introductions to study in the liberal arts. As such there are a number of goals related to information literacy that have been elaborated by previous members of the FYS staff in collaboration with the College of Wooster's Library staff. The goals include developing an understanding of "scholarly research", temporal currency of information, and validity of various kinds of evidence, as well as an understanding of intellectual property rights and the nature of plagiarism. They also include the development of bibliographic skills such as using the CONSORT library catalog and various indices and databases, as well as simply increasing the extent to which students engage the services of our librarians.
In general, these goals have been pursued by way of scheduling one or two (usually one) class meetings with a librarian where the library facilities are reviewed, followed by assignments that include bibliographic components. Recently a number of resources have become available that hold the potential for helping FYS faculty members to develop powerful teaching methods in information literacy. Among these are the Information Literacy Competency Standards developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) which provide a fine set of performance indicators of information literacy. Also, the Five Colleges of Ohio have received a grant from AT&T to implement web-based information literacy instruction which has led to, among other things, the development of some excellent general tutorials in information literacy .
We are proposing to develop and evaluate 5 different sets of instructional materials and assignments in information literacy which will be specific to each of the FYS topics listed above. Each individual faculty member will work with an individual librarian to develop instructional tools that will directly reflect the dimensions of information literacy apparent in the ACRL standards and the Ohio Five tutorials. These materials will be evaluated in terms of student performance in various bibliographic exercises as well as student evaluations of the procedures. We will meet as a group before classes begin to develop common evaluation tools and we will work individually according to the specific plans outlined below.
Specific Plans
William Scott (Violence and Aggression) plans to work with a librarian to develop
an overarching assignment of asking students to develop an informational web page
regarding the topic of the students' term paper. For example, a student might
choose the Rwandan Genocide as his or her topic. The web page will be organized
according to various dimensions and categories of information such as temporal
context, information from scholarly sources vs. popular sources, primary vs.
secondary sources, factual vs. opinion, reference sources, databases, and web
sites. William Scott will work during the summer with a reference librarian to
develop a set of assignments that will instruct the students in the character of
each category of information as the students develop the final web page in a step-wise
pattern. He will also develop a model web site that students will be able to
use as a template for the development of their projects.
Arnold Lewis (Poor People's Campaigns and their Consequences) plans to
develop his FYS section in a modular fashion. Each module will be designed with
the purpose exploring a specific social movement/event and the relationship/policy
connections between the poor and the state at the time. Students will be asked
to discover why the event occurred and what were the consequences/outcomes of
the event. Although the modules will have a specific issue orientation, they
will be designed to enhance student research and evaluation skills. The assignments
he intends to develop will help students become better evaluators of the utility
and purpose of various sources of social science information. In the end, students
should be more capable of finding, evaluating and managing various resources of
social science information to reconstruct public policy histories of various
social events. He plans to devote one week of his curricular development tasks
to working closely with a social science reference librarian to garner ideas and
strategies that he can integrate within the modules of his FYS section to fulfill
thematic objectives while promoting the following skills:
Library searches of social science resources (i.e. social science citation index)
Web/Online searches of social science resources (i.e. policy/government information
web sites, advocacy organization sites/publications)
Comparative evaluation of the author/sources/providers of information
Comparative evaluation of the methodology of social science information
Pamela Frese (Interpretations of Historic Time: Museums and Tourist Sites in Cultural Context) plans to incorporate dimensions of information literacy into students understanding of various ways in which an historic time period can be remembered. Students will learn how to access information in print and electronic format in their endeavors to compare different versions of history as potentially competing, yet complementary, views of an historic time. Students will learn to use historical documents, newspaper files, popular and scholarly texts, and the WEB as sources for information. In particular, students will be expected to show proficiency in using CONSORT library catalogue including the Index to Journal Articles, newspaper indices, and newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s on microfiche. Students will participate in a WEB based information literacy instruction tutorial early in the semester. Pam Frese will work in partnership with a librarian to integrate information literacy into this seminar.
James Burnell (Life in the City) plans to develop a series of assignments linked to the various topic areas of the course that describe the experience of living in the city. One component of the course focuses on the sense of community that exists in city neighborhoods. Students would be required to choose a city and use sources such as the web version of the city's newspaper to identify factors that influence a resident's sense of community. Another component of the course looks at the role the city plays in literature and the arts. A student may choose, for example, to investigate the beat generation in New York. The student may investigate web sites devoted to the beats as well as consider scholarly critiques of the literary works of beat writers. James Burnell will work with a librarian over the summer to develop a series of assignments that will complement the student's written assignments in the topic areas. The assignments will be developed to provide the students with experience in different types of information sources ranging from web sources to scholarly journals.
Robert Varga (Myths, Legends, and Earth Science of the Mediterranean Region) plans to work with library staff to produce a set of exercises and materials to (1) foster an understanding of the use and misuse of reference materials in their academic papers, (2) guide students to an understanding of critical vs. non-critical references particularly on the WEB, and to (3) bring students to a common understanding of plagiarism and what constitutes plagiarism. In previous years, some of these topics have been approached with one session-long lecture by a library staff person. It is the hope this proposal to have students actively participate in the exploration of these topics through interactive exercises. One of the early topics of this seminar (e.g. the Naochian Flood, the myth of Atlantis) will be chosen as a vehicle around which to develop interactive, computer-based exercises that touch on the three topics mentioned above. While learning about evaluation of literature quality, plagiarism, etc., students will, at the same time, be learning about a seminar subject for which they will be writing a paper. It is hoped that the process of active learning over a relevant topic will more fully engage students than the previous lecture-based model of previous years.
Evaluation. Specific student performance goals that consist of an objective operationalization of the ACRL standards that apply to each project will be developed. As well, student evaluations of the assignments and exercises will be sought. A group of FYS students from other sections will be recruited to serve as a controlled comparison group to determine if the course changes we introduce lead to measurable differences in information literacy in the students.
Additional Products. The participants in this project plan to give a workshop discussing the outcome of the work they did in the FYS spring workshops that are given to prepare faculty for teaching FYS in the following fall. A number of generic web tools that will be useful in most any FYS section will be developed as a result of this project. It is also expected that there will be new and revised sets of materials available to the FYS faculty that include updates and revisions of the previously cited goals and objectives regarding information literacy in the first year for students at the College of Wooster.