Get Enlightened! A Few Notes from ELD Lightning Talks

At University of Michigan, engineering librarians partner with health and business librarians to train students on research tools. This allows them to make contacts across campus and develop a joint libguide. Assessment data showed students learning resources they needed to complete multidisciplinary project work. See their online research guide at http://guides.lib.umich.edu/heb.

Caroline Smith at U Las Vegas, Engineering & Architecture Library worked with faculty collaborators to develop a laboratory for educational media exploration. A 3D immersive environment will be created in one of their former study rooms. Students will be able to do software simulations in this space. Positive response from students already about this space. The room will double as a group study space.

Tom Volkening from Michigan State University experienced a sudden renovation project, so surveyed ASEE ELD and 13 of 15 libraries who responded retained the print engineering index. Most libraries put these indexes into off-site storage. MSU are  withdrawing 150 feet of print indexes due to redundancy with online subscription sources.

Eugene Barsky from University of British Columbia shared his info about mining life cycle in this region and symposia. They digitized and provided them free online via the UBC institutional repository. Usage is higher than expected, 5,000 per year. Next step is to work on other conference materials, such as Tailing and Mining Waste.

Jay Bhatt, Drexel, discussed his work with graduate students and teaching information skills. They found first year graduate students were not aware of the research databases within their field of study. Bhatt is working with 12 students, from under-represented populations to bridge them to Ph.D. They created series of six lectures ranging from literature review, current awareness, to citation management.  Delivering in-person through active learning. Assessment includes 2-3 page paper with references using citation management tools. They gave presentations and librarians provided feedback (see Bhatt’s SLA 2011 Poster presentation). Check out the Drexel online tutorials as well.

Amy Van Epps, Purdue University created a workshop “best practices in ethical writing” geared towards graduate students within a teaching course. Van Epps used Wiggins & McTighe's Understanding by Design as basis with “end in mind." Students created concept map with all of the pieces they wanted to teach then asked them to label need to know, good to know, or get familiar with to aid them to prioritize educational content. She tied in “plagiarism” education within this course, and help “ensure understanding” by differentiating between paraphrased, quoted sources.

David  Hubbard from Texas A&M University Libraries offers weekly office hours in the Chemistry building. He offers weekly topics often based on student/faculty questions, sometimes new features/updates, and sharing his own experiences with effective database use. This outreach endeavor serves also as educational opportunity for himself, since he needs to come up with 16 weekly topics. This information is added to the ChemE Librarian Blog and Twitter as a supplement his outreach efforts, and are geared towards graduate students and faculty.

Karen Vagts from Tufts University discussed her collaboration between the library and career development center. Building relationships with career staff can benefit the students, and staff can cross-promote their services.

Bob Schwartzwalder from Stanford discussed digitization of maps, as they are seeing a growing interest in maps and geospatial information. This project is at the “fusion of library’s and IT.” A rare map collection will be digitzed using their new map digitization faculty and a suite of services will be offered. 3D maps with fly-through, 2D maps with ability to compare, resize, and view various thematic views, also, geo-referencing maps in Google Earth.

Karen Andrews at UC Davis, worked with a professor to create small modules using Camtasia to help students learn library resources, such as using Web of Science or Avoiding Plagiarism.

Tracey Primich from Vanderbilt U enthusiastically shared her plan of attack when working with “the dreaded freshmen seminar” for the library-required session.  She gave it a new twist by calling it "Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and uses Edward Tufte’s book. Each assignment required the use of library resources. Had fun teaching students to “lie with data.”  Leveraged Tufte’s opinionated text to foster discussion with students. High student ratings ensued. Allowed Primich to build more interactions with School of Engineering.

Daureen Nesdill, Data Curation Librarian at U of Utah shared her knowledge of ELN or Electronic Laboratory Notebooks, which have been used in industry but not adopted widely within higher education. “This is the lab bench of the future.” The people-side, ELN allows for provenance, validation (date, time stamps, e-signatures), and sharing data with colleagues. Researchers who oversees labs can use this data from the ELN to take a bigger picture look at the researcher happening in his/her lab.
Librarians role? Well, we are already helping with data management plans, institutional repositories, and so on. We need to move back a stage to assist researchers at the grant and data generation phase.

Debbie Morrow at Grand Valley State University has an ABET visit coming up, so library came into the picture with ABET3, lifelong learning. The library had developed IL Core Competencies and worked with curriculum coordinator of engineering 220 course to embed information skills.

Najwa Hanel, from University of Southern California discussed her work with a large population of international students and collaborations with other departments on campus to ensure that these students succeed.

Martin Wallace, University of Maine, offered a brief ACRL IL standards and STEM standards comparison. STEM 3 areas of emphasis:
1. Rapid pace of change within disciplines, need to maintain currency
2. STEM information pose challenges in identifying, evaluating, acquiring, and using information (varied formats, specialized software, etc)
3. Competencies extend beyond IL to software, simulations, etc. 

Why is this important? Mapping with ABET and helps us focus on these more specialized standards for assessment.

Julia Gelfand from UC Irvine discussed her numerous outreach venues and librarians' transitions to new roles. They support engineering societies on campus, connect with student groups and associations, engage students during National Engineering Week. They are now working with Engineers without Borders on campus. She leads journal reading groups for alumni. The “payoff not only in dollars but commitment.” Ask what you can do to extend your own library services.

Special Interest Groups: Assessment of libraries, of learning

Our small group discussed ideas on assessment and tools/strategies used:

... of learning:

• Outcomes-based, some libraries create outcomes for their overall information literacy programs, some at the course-level, some at the instruction session level. At course-level, one example involved librarian-faculty collaboration to implement 7-question pre and post-test, print journals was an area students have trouble with locating, others mentioned using quizes, looking at projects/papers, getting faculty feedback on improvement in student learning
• Student self-assessment tied in with larger institutional instruments (a few questions on information literacy are incorporated)
• One idea is to study how recent alumni have transferred their information literacy knowledge from the university to the workplace
• Citation analysis of papers/projects
• Working with faculty on assessment of projects, esp. literature review sections
• Importance of collaborating with faculty, directors of writing centers and first year programs and tying in with AbET, NEASC and other regional accreditation self-studies, etc.
• Bruce recommended taking a look at Mark Emmons work at U of New Mexico
• We joked about using a Facebook quiz. "Everyone would take it."
  

... of libraries and services:

• some participate or will soon in the following standardized: MISO: Merged Information Services Organizations, LibQUAL+® for service quality, and homegrown tools
• Other tools we briefly discussed: project SAILS, ETS iSkills Assessment
• For reference assessment some use in-house surveys, also a online link within after virtual reference to a satisfaction survey, other ideas that came up include mystery shopper in collaboration with marketing students, as well as observation assessment of students at the reference desk.

Assessment of IL at Smith College: ABET, ACRL, & within First Year Engineering Course

Assessing Information Literacy In Engineering: Integrating A College-Wide Program With Abet-Driven Assessment
Donna Riley, Smith College, described how they formalized their information literacy program in fall 2003 and are moving towards an institutional-wide program that incorporates assessment of discipline-specific measures. At first they tapped into the first year writing intensive course. Their IL program has grown into a discipline-by-discipline curriculum-integrated approach based on ACRL information literacy standards and science and technology standards. Around 40% of the departments have developed department-specific IL outcomes already, others are working on theirs. They are now at phase two and collecting data to assess student learning. The engineering faculty wanted their outcomes to dovetail with ABET criteria so they have hybridized the ACRL/ABET. ILST performance indicators are highly detailed and ABET outcomes are broader so faculty needed to design an assessment plan that could work for both. The literature shows that each institution develops their own outcomes even though there have been some papers, including some within ASEE-ELD in past years that have dealt with alignment, or mapping ABET to ACRL standards.


At Smith, they decided to map their own standards with ABET/ACRL in various focus areas related to information literacy. First mentioned is lifelong learning which Smith has developed more detailed performance goals that are measurable. The second area of focus on is ethics as stated in ABET broadly as “an understanding of professional and ethic responsibility” which related to ACRL 4/ILST4. They developed their own outcome and again, performance criteria that embodies this. Communication is the third focus area Riley mentioned and showed specific performance criteria that includes “student exhibits clear writing style,” etc, see paper for details. The final area of focus for Smith Engineering is experimentation which does not map well with ABET so they added wording into their performance criteria “finding and using information” in addition to “data.”

Riley discussed how their use of e-portfolios allows for assessment of their performance indicators in the aforementioned categories. Student assessment also occurs within courses, for instance students produce final portfolio instead of taking a final exam in her course. At the program level, assessment occurs after sophomore year by review of the portfolio and later near graduation a panel of faculty review the e-portfolios. Possible evidence for IL: annotated bibliographies, ethics case analyses related to information, reports from design projects, and so on.

Riley thinks that ABET should revise 3(b) to include language that addresses need for information literacy and makes suggestions for how they could do this in their paper.

Riley followed up by presenting another paper, Integrating Information Literacy Into A First-Year Mass And Energy Balances Course, co-authored Smith College librarian Rocco Piccinino. Smith’s curriculum-integrated approach to IL is sequenced throughout students college career, however this paper focuses on one specific course, a first year second semester course which is required of all engineering majors. Course objectives include engineering calculations, mass/energy balances, as well as engineering ethics, and information literacy which revolves around a life cycle assessment project.

Riley assigned a reading and held discussion with her students prior to the library research session. The reading (Graham, L. and Metaxas, P.T. (2003). “Of course it’s true, I saw it on the Internet”: Critical thinking in the Internet era. Communications of the ACM 46 (5):70-75.) is about students’ performance on an information literacy test showed that they tend to be over confident in their research abilities. Riley felt this helped her students check their own over confidence. She also asked students to do a homework assignment to practice information retrieval and access, in addition incorporated a question on her mostly content-intensive mid-term exam about IL. She mentions the importance for faculty to integrate and reinforce IL skills but throughout the course. She has her students put skills into immediate practice and makes them accountable by ensuring students are using appropriate documentation, creating annotated bibliographies, and so on in an iterative way.

Assessment of student learning included various components. First, they used a one minute paper at the end of the session, which students rated learning experience as excellent or good, mentioned that highlights were learning about databases, navigating web site, full text icon, etc. but students did not mention the in-class group activity or evaluation of sources, so they may revise assessment to determine value of these components.

Second, Riley performed focus groups and of the 24 students invited, 9 participated in 2 sessions. She had three guiding questions not specifically related to information literacy and 4 of 9 mentioned information literacy and the value to their learning and at least one related IL to critical thinking.

Third, a course survey, or student self-assessment of initial course objectives, which showed that IL was on high end, though “it wasn’t most central it made an impression on them.”

Fourth, analysis of Student Work including homework, tests and projects showed from an initial quiz where students performed poorly on information literacy after research session and projects, students showed significant improvement. Still one of their biggest difficulties was determining holding for a journal with both online and print formats.

Riley feels factors contributing to student learning include:
- Librarian inclusion
- Reinforcement by faculty member
- Iteration
- Integration – accountability across coursework

This approach may be more resource intensive but authors recommend featuring and sharing faculty work in these areas, gaining faculty buy-in and creating incentives for participation. Most important is developing relationships to make this happen.