Starting From Scratch: Meaningful Integration of Information Literacy through Collaborative Course and Assignment Design Chris Sweet, Information Literacy Librarian Meghan Burke, Assistant Professor of Sociology LOEX Conference, 2014

What are some common assignment & instruction problems that drive librarians nuts? ● Find and copy a print journal article ● Scavenger hunts for library stuff ● Teach them to find good information (but I’m going to give them everything they need). ● I want them to know how to do academic research, but they don’t really need it for this class.

Turnabout is fair play... What are some common disconnects between disciplinary faculty and librarians regarding assignment design and library instruction?

Faculty-Librarian Disconnects ● Students must find and then evaluate everything ever written on a given topic and then only use the best three sources. ● The primary pedagogical goals of an assignment are usually not to teach research skills or information literacy. ● How students use and interpret evidence within a paper is often more important than the information itself.

And another thing... “I don’t have any time for information literacy in this course because I have so much disciplinary content to cover.”

What Happens When Assignments and Courses are Collaboratively Designed? ● Information literacy becomes a natural fit that enhances the course, rather than an add-on ● IL becomes more of a shared responsibility between instructor and librarian ● Course and assignment design flows from course learning outcomes

Mellon Grant Overview ● Brief history ● Library Campus-Wide Faculty Development Survey (pedagogical goals) ● CFP’s for collaborative assignment and course design ● Required use of local and/or national IL standards.

What We Did: Assignment Grant SOC 230: Race and Ethnic Relations ● Elements: Literature review of relevant scholarship, incorporated into course papers (which were then higher quality) ● Formal Assessment: content analysis of student reflection papers ● Should have been a course revision

Assessment: Student Reflection Papers ● Active revision of their thesis and argument through engagement with the literature o “Throughout the process of writing my paper, my thinking went very back and forth with how I felt about the thesis I had chosen.” o “I decided to switch my thesis back to my original idea. I feel that I found sufficient evidence to support my claim and used the evidence that supported my antithesis to provide arguments to further what I believed.” o “I knew immediately what my topic was going to be. What I did not know was how my research and the material we learned throughout this course would shape the topic and add to and change my ideas about interracial relationships.” o “…it is the first research paper that I have written here that has made me really think about my own stance on the topic.”

Assessment: Student Reflection Papers Window into student research process, and how it was enhanced ● “I realized that I would have to push myself not to use search engine such as Google. This was a challenge for me because this is the first time in my college career that I had to depend entirely on databases, which is a sad story in itself.” ● “My writing process for this paper was unique in that this was the first time that I had several drafts of the paper prior to my final draft.” ● “When I chose my sources, the annotated bibliography definitely helped, because I had to read through the full source and really analyze the source before including it in my bibliography.” ● “I realized that Google search was not giving me mainly academic sources.” ● “This time the research drove my paper.”

New Course and Course Revision Senior Seminar and SOC 350: Advanced Race and Ethnic Relations ● Lit Review: Issues and Solutions o Concept Mapping Workshop ● National Information Literacy Standards for Anthropology and Sociology Students ● How did the papers turn out?

Lit Review Concept Mapping

Where do we go from here? ● Sociology Departmental Assessment Work o Found core information literacy and writing problems that were showing up in our senior work o Developed course-level goals to implement in all classes in order to overcome them o More deliberate sequencing of IL instruction throughout the SOC major.

That’s all well and good, but what about stepping on toes? ● Instruction Session Planning (discuss course and assignment goals first) ● Instruction/Assignment follow-ups. Are they getting the results they want? ● After multiple iterations of an instruction section

How can you do something like this without external funding?

Thank you! We welcome your feedback and questions. Examples of assignments and CFP’s are available here: sweethttp://tinyurl.com/burke- sweet ● Meghan Burke ● Chris Sweet