Innovative approaches to information literacy instruction for engineering undergraduates at Drexel University

As information professionals, engineering librarians have the primary responsibilities of providing access to engineering information resources and giving instruction in how to use these resources. In the case of undergraduate engineering students, this extends to building their information literacy skills, an important component in helping them become lifelong learners; to be curious and independent, and to take greater responsibility for their own learning. The challenge in building information literacy in engineering students is to acquaint the students with the array of library resources available to them and to help them intelligently navigate the systems that contain the information. Too often, information literacy instruction is presented as a set of procedures for locating a hypothetical resource in the library. However, students are not interested in finding some resource randomly chosen as an example; they want to find resources that they perceive as being important and useful. During the 2005–2006 academic year, the engineering librarians at Drexel University took this into consideration and employed a new methodology for information literacy instruction: combining an online tutorial covering basic library skills with face-to-face consultations between student design teams and the engineering librarians. By utilizing varied instruction techniques aimed at different learning styles, with a strong active learning component delivered at the student's point of need—when they have a concrete, perceived information need—information literacy instruction can be improved so that engineering students retain more and develop lifelong learning skills.     

Developing team skills through a collaborative writing assignment

Employers want students who are able to work effectively as members of a team, and expect universities to develop this ability in their graduates. This paper proposes a framework for a collaborative writing assignment that specifically develops students’ ability to work in teams. The framework has been tested using two iterations of an action research project, with this paper focusing on the second iteration. The paper provides detailed information on how the framework was implemented, and then reports on the students’ perceptions of their learning about teamwork.     

Increasing Student Interest and Engagement with Business Cases by Turning Them into Consulting Exercises

How can you get undergraduate students more interested and engaged with business cases? Instead of using the traditional case teaching format, turn the case into a consulting exercise. Give students only the managerial dilemma and some starting information, form them into consulting teams, and then have each team requests additional case information by submitting a restricted number of questions. Through successive rounds, teams will gather enough information and data to analyze the situation and develop a set of recommendations. This approach transforms case‐based learning from a passive analysis of case details to an active process of discovery through smart questioning.     

Identification of dysfunctional cooperative learning teams and troubled individuals

In cooperative learning, students work together as a team to maximize the academic success of all the team members. The failure of even a single member can compromise the success of the entire team. Thus, to evaluate the functioning of the team reliably, it is necessary to consider both the performance of the individual team members and the interactions among them. In this study, a method was developed for identifying dysfunctional teams and troubled individuals by examining the correlation between the team scores obtained in sequential tests and the correlation between the scores obtained by the different team members. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated via field experiments. Forty‐eight students were randomly assigned to cooperative learning teams and their learning performance assessed by four‐unit tests. The results indicated that the proposed method can identify the most troubled individuals in a team even when the team performance/grouping information is not taken explicitly into account. Furthermore, when the team information is considered, the method can identify both the dysfunctional teams and the troubled individuals within the teams. Therefore, the proposed method provides a useful basis for the development of computer‐assisted solutions for assessing the performance of cooperative learning teams.     

Rubrics for developing students’ professional judgement: A study of sustainable assessment in arts education

The participation of students in assessment is known to generate higher-order learning outcomes. This study aims to determine the usefulness of rubrics in aiding the incorporation of undergraduate students into assessor teams for developing their professional judgement. A quasi-experimental study examined the effects of a brief training programme on the use of rubrics, and of the participation of students in rubric creation and moderation discussions. We calculated Cronbach’s alphas, and intraclass correlation coefficients in order to examine the intra- and inter-rater reliability between all the members of the assessor teams. The results demonstrate that only participation in the rubric design and in the moderation discussions regulating their use helped undergraduate students to develop sound assessment skills. We infer that rubrics can help to promote professional judgement if they are conceived as instructional resources for defining and supporting the processes of negotiation and agreement that characterize an assessment culture.     

Student experience of a scenario-centred curriculum

In 2006 UCL implemented new scenario-centred degree programmes in Civil and Environmental Engineering. The new curriculum can be characterised as a hybrid of problem-based, project-based and traditional approaches to learning. Four times a year students work in teams for one week on a scenario which aims to integrate learning from lecture and laboratory classes and to develop generic skills including team working and communication. Student experience of the first two years the old and new curricula were evaluated using a modified Course Experience Questionnaire. The results showed that students on the new programme were motivated by the scenarios and perceived better generic skills development, but had a lower perception of teaching quality and the development of design skills. The results of the survey support the implementation new curriculum but highlight the importance of strong integration between conventional teaching and scenarios, and the challenges of adapting teaching styles to suit.     

Design Decisions in Developing Learning Trajectories–Based Assessments in Mathematics: A Case Study

This article analyzes the design decisions of a team developing diagnostic assessments for a learning trajectory focused on rational number reasoning. The analysis focuses on the design rationale for key decisions about how to develop the cognitive assessments and related validity arguments within a fluid state and national policy context. The study draws on ethnographic methods adapted from science, technology, and society studies to document key rationales for decisions. For this team, concerns about the validity of both the assessments and the hypothetical trajectory, anticipated uses of the assessments, and the available distribution of resources and expertise to different project activities were all considerations for significant design decisions throughout the project. The study findings suggest that success in the design of trajectories-based assessments depends on teams’ attention to balancing core design activities with engagement in the external policy environment, balancing precision with utility for diagnosis in defining the levels of a trajectory, and balancing the goals of supporting and assessing student learning.     

Supporting project teams: A framework used in a university‐community collaborative initiative

As commonplace as teams are in today's organizations, so too are the frustrations reported by members of many teams. Some of this frustration may be attributed to the lack of organizational support for team efforts. In this article, we draw on Kolb's components of clear direction and accountability, appropriate staffing and training, adequate information and resources, and rewards for team effort to describe and discuss a framework that was developed to support a series of 29 project teams. We use case study methodology to examine a university‐community initiative designed to increase collaboration between members of a university community and stakeholders external to the university. This design resulted in a continuous learning and feedback cycle that encouraged reflective thinking and improvement in procedures and outcomes. The focus is on the framework that was developed and executed to select, support, and evaluate these teams.     

综合多种教学法的大学课程教学设计

近年来,多种教学方法层出不穷,如:合作学习、对分课堂、发生教学法、混合式教学、参与式教学等,这些不同的教学法有不同的理论依据和侧重点。我们在多年教学实践中基于各方法的优势,对团队承担的《普通昆虫学》课程进行了改革和重新设计:将班级学生分为4—5人学习战队,形成合作学习共同体,每次课程分为5个步骤:讨论互助、对战、总结、讲授和内化吸收。该课程设计基于对分课堂的“课堂时间对分”和“讲授与讨论时间错开,学生自主学习内化吸收”,同时利用了合作学习的“生生互动,形成团队,相互帮助”,混合式教学的“对在线数字媒体的利用”,发生教学法的“依照知识的产生和发展进行讲解”,参与式教学的“积极参与”。新的教学设计核心理念是结合在线教育、讲授式课堂和讨论式课堂的优势,教师作为引导者,同一学习战队成员间形成利益捆绑体,学生主观能动性得到调动,积极参与教学活动,课后一周时间学生内化吸收,对抗遗忘。     

‘Isn’t It Just Like Our Situation?’ Engagement and Learning in an Online Story-Based Environment

Teamwork skills such as conflict resolution and communication strategies are challenging to teach. The use of stories may help develop these complex skills. Although engagement is generally seen as a key component of learning environments, what constitutes engagement has not been fully explored. The purpose of this study was to examine how graduate instructional design students engage with and learn from stories in an online environment. This WisdomTools Scenario (Scenario) was designed specifically to facilitate the development of teamwork skills. Students followed the experiences of two fictitious student teams and discussed what happened asynchronously with small dialogue groups. Through a qualitative case study analysis, four themes emerged which captured how students engaged with and learned from this environment. First, engagement was evident through students’ emotional reactions to the characters. Second, this engagement was affected by perceived credibility and relevance of the scenes. Third, students often reflected on their prior experiences and demonstrated an increased awareness of teamwork issues. Fourth, students reported various degrees of application of what they learned to their team practice. Implications for the design of story-based learning environments are explored.     

Evaluating Groupware Support for Software Engineering Students

Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology. Experience of working with groupware and evaluating groupware systems will also give software engineering students a direct appreciation of the requirements of engineering such systems.     

The effect of team feedback and guided reflexivity on team performance change

Providing teams with feedback has been forwarded as a powerful practice to improve their learning and performance. Yet, this learning potential may not be realized unless teams actively process this feedback by stepping back from their team activity, building plans, and ultimately putting them into action. In an experimental study (N = 212 undergraduate students), we compared the effects of team-level feedback with or without an intervention prompting shared reflection on the feedback (i.e., guided reflexivity) to a no feedback control group on team performance growth. The results showed that only the combination of team performance feedback and guided reflexivity lead to performance change, at the beginning of team activity. These findings suggest that prompting feedback processing at an early stage of collaborative work has the power to help teams benefit from their past experiences and improve performance.     

大数据背景下高职学生自主学习策略探析

大数据时代,信息和数据结构的发展,对教育领域产生了重要影响力,如弥合区域间高等教育资源配置,促进教育平等,满足学习者多样化的需求,提升了教育的社会化服务,使教育规模化和个性化的达到了统一。大数据教育资源的使用提供了改变学生需求的新模式,学习模式不再限于空间和时间;运用教育大数据提供的服务,构建出的基于信息数据的自主学习环境,不仅培养学生自主学习习惯,提升大学生学习兴趣,更为学生的自主学习营造了智慧化的环境。     

Developing the capacity of teacher‐librarians to meet the diverse needs of all schoolchildren: Project ENABLE

US school libraries are required to ensure that schoolchildren and school staff with disabilities have equal opportunity to use and benefit from library facilities and information services under federal law. However, evidence indicates teacher‐librarians (TLs) often lack the training, knowledge and skills to provide programmes and services that meet the needs of students with disabilities. Project ENABLE (Expanding Nondiscriminatory Access by Librarians Everywhere) was created to respond to this shortfall by designing, implementing and evaluating a professional development programme in New York State. The project applies a social model of disability to help 100 TLs, special educators and general educators further develop their skills and resources by teaming together to create an inclusive environment for all students. This is achieved through the use of universal design principles, appropriate assistive and other technologies, an emphasis on person‐first language and sensitivity simulations, a focus on inclusive lesson planning, and by developing collaboration capacity among participant teams. Curriculum development, data collection and analyses are presented. The effect of the Project ENABLE trainings was significant in terms of higher levels of skill and knowledge reported by participants for creating accessible library programmes, advancing inclusive education and building effective collaborations. Drawing from their workshop learning and resources, participant teams developed action plans to implement during the 2011–2012 school year. This project underscores the importance of TLs in the education of all students, including those with disabilities. Higher education and local professional development programmes must place greater emphasis on preparing TLs to perform this role effectively and confidently.     

网络精品课程建设的标准要求与开发策略

评价网络教育课程质量不能只看网上资源,而应全面衡量课程的教学设计、教学资源、教学过程和教学效果.网络课程的基本要求突出表现在:适于学生自主学习、准确呈现学习内容、便于开展师生交互、设计有效学习活动等四个方面;开发与设计网络精品课程,要掌握课程设计和教学分析方法,精心设计课程内容和表现形式,运用教学策略激发学生的学习兴趣,重视导学、助学与促学的设计,规范设计程序和发挥课程组作用.     

远程开放教育中教学资源建设大团队协作的思考

天津电大在共享专业课程教学资源建设和课程考核改革的实践探索充分说明,要建设适合电大学生自学、符合学科标准规范、被学习者所普遍喜爱的学习资源,不能只依赖普通高校主讲、主编和电大主持教师组成的小精英团队,而必须以贴近平民、呵护平民进步为原则,有效整合大团队协作,特别是充分发挥电大系统人力资源优势才能做到。     

Enabling team learning in healthcare

This paper is based on a study of learning processes within 35 healthcare therapy teams that took action to improve their services. The published research on team learning is introduced, and the paper suggests it is an activity that has similarities with action research and with those forms of action learning where teams address collective problems to enhance organisational performance. The paper proposes factors within the teams and in the teams’ environments that enabled team learning, in particular, within the team, the behaviours of team leaders to encourage learning, communication, planning, action and review, and in the teams’ environments, the behaviour of senior managers and other stakeholders in positions of authority, access to effective information systems, and the availability of a modest amount of resource to enable team learning.     

An interactive online course: A collaborative design model

The purpose of this paper is to describe the evaluation results of using an interactive design model for the development of an online course. Specifically, it examines: (a) how an interactive design model was used to develop collaborative and cooperative learning activities; (b) how activities were structured to promote the level and quality of communications among students, as peers, and between students and the instructors; and (c) how students responded to such interactive design model. The paper also provides information about the delivery process and describes what happened when this interactive model was fully implemented and used.     

从搜索表层信息到截获深层信息——高中阅读教学中学生信息处理能力培养探究

信息时代对人的要求在很大程度上取决于个人对信息搜索、获取、吸收、传递和创造的能力。学生在网络信息时代应该充分利用网络中丰富的信息资源为语文学习服务,培养快读、快写、快思的语文素养,以适应社会发展的需求。网络信息所显示的快捷、新鲜、繁多、不确定等特点,要求中学语文教师在语文教学中能够帮助学生利用网络有效地筛选并获取信息资源,实现阅读和写作方式的变革和发展。笔者在课堂教学和语文活动课中,尝试利用网络有意识地培养学生搜索和截获语言信息的能力。在网络时代,应用建构主义学习模式,采用探究性学习的形式能够有效地提高学生获取并运用语言信息的能力。