With a Little Help from My Friends

Abstract

This article highlights a project on information literacy that began in the fall semester of 2003 at the University of Redlands. The faculty in the School of Education needed an information literacy component for their teacher credential program. The Manager of Instructional Technology believed that a tutorial of this type would work well in the Blackboard Course Management System, and the Off-Campus Services Librarian, who is the library liaison for the School of Education, was a natural choice as the person to present the tutorial to the students. The beginning information literacy workshop was developed in the fall of 2003, and the advanced workshop was developed in the spring of 2004. This article provides an overview of the content of the tutorial and workshops, as well as some conclusions about the project in general.     

Educational Technology and College Librarianship

ABSTRACT

The fields of educational technology and librarianship interact in many significant areas: information literacy, distance learning, the design and management of instructional materials, etc. Given the congruence of concerns between the two disciplines, it is illustrative to relate the historical development of the definition of educational technology to librarianship. This article surveys briefly the development of the definition of educational technology and the relationship of college librarianship to these developments. Finally, the study places an explanation of librarianship within the 2008 definition of educational technology promulgated by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) and concludes that college librarianship is the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources of many formats.     

Learning More About How They Think: Information Literacy Instruction in a Campus-Wide Critical Thinking Project

ABSTRACT

Critical thinking and information literacy are strongly connected. At Washington State University, librarians have been involved with first-year experience programs and with a grant-funded critical thinking project that enhanced the library instruction and outreach efforts and has led to increased involvement with new initiatives on campus.     

Learn something new in 20 minutes: Bite Size sessions to support research and teaching

The School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at The University of Sheffield run an innovative series of informal 20‐minute Bite Size sessions to help staff and students teach, research, collaborate and communicate more effectively. The sessions have two clear strands: one focused on teaching and the other on research. The remit is not to teach people how to use something in their work or study, but to let them know why they should use it and how they can employ it. By introducing participants to the possibilities and how they can apply ideas and technologies in their work and study in an enthusiastic manner, it is possible to send them away with at least the intention to explore and experiment. The evidence shows that this organic approach is working – staff and students are starting to use many of the tools that Bite Size has covered. Any kind of widespread change within organisations can be hard to deliver, but by bringing champions on your side and delivering sessions in a convenient, informal and timely manner; good practice and ideas can spread naturally. H.S.     

InfoIQ: Targeting Information and Technology Lifelong Needs

SUMMARY

The evolution of information literacy instruction for graduate students at the UCLA Anderson School of Management is described. The emphasis is on the need for instruction that develops student competencies with an eye toward the long view-a lifetime of learning. Key success factors are leveraging partnerships with key stakeholders, and developing just-in-time interventions at significant events in the student life cycle. An Information Literacy Campaign helped define the needs and competencies, and the subsequent pilot program, InfoIQ, has been successful in integrating information literacy instruction into the core MBA experience.     

Looking for the library: Using an undergraduate business syllabi analysis to inform an instruction program

This study analyzed 260 syllabi representing a year of the undergraduate curriculum from a business school. The syllabi were examined based on the mentions of the library from across three categories: spaces, resources, and services, as well as possible opportunities for engagement that librarians could target for collaboration. In this study, the library was mentioned 79 times, mostly in relation to library resources. There were also 479 opportunities for engagement coded. This study found that the majority of undergraduate syllabi do not mention the library, but that there are considerable opportunities that librarians can target for future engagement.     

A hierarchical approach to Students’ Assessments of Instruction

A teacher evaluation system can be threatening to faculty, especially if used for summative decisions. Therefore, it is important to obtain valid and pertinent information. Since students are extensively exposed to course elements, students’ evaluation of instruction should be one of several components in the teacher evaluation system. Since traditional methods, such as Cronbach’s alpha and ordinary least squares regression, do not address the hierarchical data of the classroom, the current study used the statistical techniques of confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical linear modelling in order to properly investigate the reliability and validity of the Students’ Assessment of Instruction (SAI) instrument. Use of hierarchical linear modelling to analyse teacher evaluation instruments could not be found in the literature, although it has been used in educational settings. This study will illustrate its usefulness in determining what measures are related, either as evidence of validity or as a bias, to instructional effectiveness. Student responses were also compared with faculty self-evaluations, one indicator of effective teaching, in order to determine if the SAI does measure instructional effectiveness. Overall, the SAI was found to have good reliability and validity with relatively few biases and could be used to extract five distinguishable traits of instructional effectiveness.     

Curriculum Materials as a Vehicle for Innovation: A case study of the Nuffield Design and Technology Project

Prior to the advent of the National Curriculum in England and Wales, the production of teaching materials was an established vehicle for curriculum change. The Nuffield Design and Technology Project recently published extensive materials which enlarge upon the National Curriculum. This paper presents an investigation based on case studies of two teachers in separate schools, each using Nuffield publications with one of their classes. It explores: how Nuffield materials were selected and adapted by teachers; the resulting balances between in-house and Nuffield influence; and teachers’ intuitive evaluations of the materials’ impact. Both teachers ‘injected’ similar Nuffield elements into existing schemes; they took ownership, exploiting the materials’ flexibility. Both prescribed the mechanical/structural elements of the product, but allowed extensive pupil autonomy over aesthetic elements. Text books were initially underused. In describing the materials’ impact, one teacher emphasised pupils’ learning, the other the improved quality of his own experience. This paper suggests that even a little training may greatly enhance teachers’ use of Nuffield resources.     

Teachers’ use of learning progression-based formative assessment to inform teachers’ instructional adjustment: a case study of two physics teachers’ instruction

ABSTRACT

To explore the affordances of learning progressions (LP) in support of teachers’ formal and informal formative assessment (FFA and IFA) practices, we conducted a case study with a fine-grain-sized energy LP. The study first theorises an LP-based formative assessment model, which proposes the use of LPs in clarifying learning objectives, eliciting and interpreting students’ understanding, and acting in instruction. Then, we examine multiple iterations of two high-school teachers’ lesson plans and their enactment of the lessons to identify the instructional adjustments teachers made as part of the LP-based FFA and IFA after professional training. We found that both teachers refined the learning objectives and activities and most of their adjustments promoted students’ learning progression; their adjustments have an interdependency between objectives and activities. Both made more adjustments in the IFA than in the FFA, but the alignment with the LP was higher in FFA than in IFA. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, both teachers perceived the LP as a content structure. However, in practice, both employed it as a reference to interpret students’ responses by comparing these responses against their own expectations. The teachers also reported collecting assessment information during teacher-student interactive activities and using this material to infer the level of students’ understanding in order to decide on the next instructional activities. Both teachers reported that the process of directly engaging with the LP formatively resulted in their having a much more nuanced sense of students’ understanding when they revisited and altered the sequence of the learning activities.