The Library and First-Year Seminars

Introduction

Introductory memo to First-Year Seminar Faculty members outlining the library's information literacy goals for first-year students.

 

Goals

 

Faculty Comments
At orientation on 5/19/06, the librarians asked what elements of information literacy were most important to the faculty. The responses formed the basis for the library's goal-setting.

 

Samples of Teaching Modules

 

Samples of Final Projects

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Plagiarism
Information about the required first-year plagiarism presentation, including a copy of the presentation and schedules.

 

 

Goals

First-Year Information Literacy Goal 1
First-year students will recognize the need for, identify, and select appropriate research tools that support their efforts to frame and answer an academic question. 

 

Students can demonstrate this goal by:

  • Finding background information on a topic
  • Choosing appropriate tools to answer a research question
  • Determining the relative academic quality of information obtained

Required tools:

  • Library’s website
  • Reference materials (print and online)
  • Google and other search engines

 

First-Year Information Literacy Goal 2
First-year students will develop relevant, balanced, and diverse lists of sources from the numerous alternatives available to them. 

 

Students can demonstrate achievement of this goal by:

  • Finding materials owned by the Waidner-Spahr Library, first in the online catalog and then in its physical format
  • Finding journal articles, both online and in print, using the library’s databases and journal lists
  • Uncovering quality information from freely available sources on the Internet
  • Learning how to obtain materials from other libraries

Required tools:

  • Library catalog
  • Journal Locator
  • Multidisciplinary article databases such as ProQuest
  • Subject specialty databases as appropriate to the topic
  • Palci’s EZ-Borrow and ILLIAD
  • Library maps

 

First-Year Information Literacy Goal 3

First-year students will make distinctions among different types of sources and determine what type of source is best for each assignment.

 

Students can demonstrate achievement of this goal by:

  • Differentiating among  popular, scholarly, and news-based sources
  • Identifying criteria that make a source acceptable to use in an academic project

Required tools:

  • ProQuest or other database that clearly differentiates different types of sources
  • Examples of different types of sources

 

First-Year Information Literacy Goal 4
First-year students will write correct and complete bibliographic citations and will understand the importance of using information ethically in scholarly communication.

 

Students can demonstrate achievement of this goal by:

  • Preparing short reference lists or bibliographies in the style of the professor’s choosing
  • Locating a source when provided with its citation

Required tools:

  • The library’s web pages on citing
  • Appropriate citation guide books
  • Journal Locator

 

First-Year Information Literacy Goal 5
First-year students know what kind of assistance librarians provide, and know how to get help in the library.

 

Students can demonstrate achievement of this goal by:

  • Working with librarians frequently as educational partners in the context of their classes
  • Contacting a librarian for help and making appointments when they need research assistance

Required tools:

  • “Ask a Librarian” feature on the library’s website
  • Subject guides on the library’s website
  • Syllabi and BlackBoard pages, when the librarian is included as a resource

Best Practices

Information literacy goals are best achieved under a set of certain optimal conditions.  We have determined through various forms of assessment that course-integrated instruction sessions are most effective and final projects are of a better quality when:

  • Some of the allotted class time is devoted to active learning;
  • Several meetings with a librarian are scheduled;
  • The instruction remains focused on only one or two concepts per session;
  • The instruction takes place in a room which allows every student access to a computer;
  • The first-year seminar professor requires students to complete graded homework exercises to reinforce the concepts learned in class;
  • The first-year seminar professor requires students to complete a research-inclusive project, weighted relatively heavily in relation to the class grade, that includes the skills learned in individual library sessions;
  • The first-year seminar professor is highly engaged in the session (for example, by being present during the session, emphasizing the importance of the session, participating in classroom discussion, helping to design assignments, etc.); and,
  • The first-year seminar professor includes the library liaison as a resource on the class syllabus, in Blackboard, on assignment sheets, and other class materials.

 

Assessment

At the request of the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and the Assistant Provost for First-Year Programs, the library staff will administer near the end of the fall of 2008 an assessment activity to determine the effectiveness of our first-year information literacy efforts.  Two randomly selected students from each first-year seminar will be asked to participate in the assessment.  Those students will complete an exercise lasting no longer than 30 minutes, in which they will demonstrate their retention of a set of specific information literacy skills that we expect to teach in each seminar. 

Additionally, librarians will continue to perform short assessments appended to in-class or homework assignment in order to monitor the effectiveness of individual classroom activities.  These assessments are designed to ensure that we deliver our best services to our students, and will help us continue to improve our information literacy program into the future.

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Faculty Comments

At orientation on 5/19/06, the librarians asked what elements of information literacy were most important to the faculty. Here is a list of topics faculty members stated were important regarding information literacy. We believe that our module approach can cover most of these, although not entirely at the first year level.

  • Understanding how knowledge is produced
  • Concepts of authorship, authority, and context of information found
  • How to discriminate and differentiate between different kinds of sources
  • Book vs. journal
  • Primary vs. secondary
  • Searching beyond Google (and evaluating sources)
  • Going beyond using a single tool to retrieve a single source
  • Problem of retrieving too much or too little information
  • How to search more effectively in databases (beyond a one-term keyword)
  • How to structure database searches effectively
  • Evaluating knowledge
  • How much IL responsibility is the faculty's vs. the librarian's
  • When to start research (eg., after formulating an original idea or thesis)
  • The timing of research
  • How to narrow the focus
  • To understand the relative trustworthiness of sources (eg. Wikipedia)
  • When is it appropriate to use Google and Wikipedia
  • Respect for the printed text (books!)
  • How to find artifacts (specimens, samples, examples) rather than articles
  • To understand what specific resources exist for different disciplines (eg. Art history still relies on mostly print)
  • How to respond to the quirks of the catalog
  • How to respond to a failed search (zero results)

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Plagiarism

All first year students are required to attend an interactive presentation on plagiarism presented by librarians early in the fall semester. First-year seminar faculty members who have not yet had the opportunity to see The Seven Deadly Sins of Plagiarsim will be invited to a demonstration during faculty orientation in August 2009. Click on the following links for important documentation related to the presentation: