LILi: Lifelong Information Literacy 2014 Conference

      Collaboration is the core principle behind JSerra’s IL instruction program with vertical alignment providing the structure for our 9th through 12th grade writing and research projects. This panel will provide information about how our IL program has evolved over time, the things we have learned (and continue to learn), tools we incorporate into our projects, and how we measure success. Media Specialist, Jeanne Swedo, will discuss her role in curriculum support, share her methodology for instruction, assessment strategies, and provide her rubric for grading research papers. Carol DeBoisblanc will review the 9th grade project on institutional discrimination which focuses on researching and summarizing articles, authoritative sources, writing a thesis, and creating a works cited. Carol will also describe the 11th grade 6-week literary analysis Huckleberry Finn research project which consists of a 12 page paper, 30 entry annotated bibliography, and a works cited. Barbara Sickler will provide information about the 10th grade genocide research project which focuses on human rights and social justice. Barbara will also discuss the 12th grade English 4/AP English multi-layered project-based learning unit which is guided by the essential question, “What could go wrong?” with the end result being a student-generated newspaper article, narrative, and TED talk. One object of JSerra’s instruction program involves providing relevance to the high school student in order to improve engagement in learning while teaching him or her how librarians and libraries assist them throughout every level of their education. Our overall goal is to graduate a student who is ready to meet the rigors of college level writing and research.

First Year Students: Meet them early and see them often!

    In 2012, a mid-sized public state university made a concerted effort to include the library and information literacy as an integral part of the first year students' university experience so as to better prepare these students for academic success. Incoming student's success when transitioning from high school to higher education relies on the student understanding the resources that are available to them at the library and how to use these resources, which is why each incoming student received a presentation from a librarian at orientation and had at least one library instruction session in their first year. Over the last two years, the First Year Experience Librarian has been able to work on this effort, gather assessment data on the instruction sessions, and make improvements to the program as needed. In this session, the librarian will discuss: 

- What worked and what didn't work when the library became part of the mandatory orientation days for all incoming students; 
- the model of information literacy library instruction sessions that were held in the library for first year students, as well as the standards and learning outcomes that were set for these sessions;
- the effective use of technology and active learning with first year university students during one shot information literacy instruction sessions delivered by the librarian.

The goal of this session is to share the successes and failures of providing information about the library and information literacy to incoming first year students, as well as ideas and tools to help draw first year students to the library and aid in these students success in their transition from high school to college.

Fostering First-Year Success: Creative Partnering in Grades 3 through 13

    Librarians from a community college, a public university, and a private university share in a panel forum their efforts to support and improve success at college research for first-year students. Too many students in their critical first-year fall through the cracks of under-preparation, over-extension, and disorientation at-large—hazards that are especially perilous for students who are first in their families to pursue a bachelor’s degree. What can academic librarians do to support these students for college retention and life-long learning? Panel presenters suggest one answer is to be found in creative and continuing partnerships with institution stake-holders, from local feeder schools to cross-campus colleagues. 

We’ll examine successes and challenges in an outreach program at Loyola Marymount University that works with elementary school students to “hook ‘em while they’re young” on the importance of libraries and research skills in the 21st century; the First Year Pathways program at Pasadena City College, where librarians have had active input and positive effect on curriculum development for programmatic info-lit instruction; and the Freshman Programs at CSU Fullerton, where library instruction initiatives assess past gains and consider future innovation in measuring information competencies. Recognizing that complex research skills demand collaboration and reinforcement across ages and disciplines, presenters will testify to the creative partnerships that they’ve witnessed breed success in bridging students from grades 3 through 13 and beyond.

Plagiarism – how prepared our students are to excel in the scholarly world?

    Academic honesty, most specifically plagiarism as well as cyber plagiarism, continues to be a problem in today’s digital age on college campuses. A common problem for college students of all levels is their understanding of what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. Research studies and the media have reported that this issue is not limited to domestic students, but international students too who have difficulty discerning what constitutes plagiarism.
However, it is still questionable how prepared native high school students are to do academic writing while avoiding plagiarism, even though this is a known issue in colleges and universities. This presentation is designed to help librarians learn how they can assist students and collaborate with classroom instructors to teach students anti-plagiarism strategies in all aspects of their research and scholarly work. This session will demonstrate students’ understanding and perception of plagiarism and how they can avoid it by correctly citing their sources when they paraphrase, summarize, and quote. Results from surveys from two very ethnically diverse universities, Adelphi University, New York and California State University, Los Angeles, will be shared!

Post-secondary Perspectives on Lifelong Learning: Information Literacy Essentials for College Success

    What skills do professors wish incoming college students had? What skills do they assume students have? What information literacy challenges do first year college students face? How can we as librarians work together to help students be successful? A panel of three librarians, each representing one of the three public higher education systems in the state of California, will share their perspectives on the research skills of students in their institutions and what their institutions are or aren’t requiring in terms of information literacy skills and how that may affect incoming students. Sample class assignments from each institution will be shared, illustrating the expectations faculty have for incoming students. We also welcome discussions and information about what is taking place at the K-12 level that may impact post-secondary institutions.

Strengthening the High School to College Transition through Collaboration: A Teacher-Librarian Institute for the Integration of Research into the K-12 Curriculum

    The 2013 Project Information Literacy report “Learning the Ropes: How Freshmen Conduct Course Research Once They Enter College” found that most of the first-year college students in the study struggled with transitioning to college-level research assignments, especially in terms of finding, evaluating, and synthesizing information in a much more extensive research environment than they had encountered in high school. The intentional partnering of university and school district librarians can help ease this transition by communicating the expectations of college-level research to high school teachers and librarians so they can scaffold information literacy learning throughout the high school curriculum. In this session, three university librarians will describe the process for planning and implementing the Teacher-Librarian Institute, a 3-day workshop hosted and facilitated by the University Libraries that gives middle and high school librarians the opportunity to work collaboratively with a department head from their school in order to embed developmental information literacy learning into multiple classes across grade levels. During the Institute, teacher-librarian teams design research-based assignments and authentic assessments and develop an action plan that includes a curriculum map, student assignments, and assessment instruments. The syllabus from the required college writing course is also shared as an impetus to discuss the research-based writing assignments that students are expected to complete in their first year as college students, and how high school research assignments can prepare students for the next level. In this panel discussion, the presenters will highlight some of this content and how the curriculum for the Teacher-Librarian Institute was developed. Collaboration with the school district to recruit teacher-librarian teams and plans for assessing the Institute will also be discussed. At the end of the presentation, participants will be able to conceptualize a method for high school and college librarians to collaborate in easing the high school-to-college transition.

10-MINUTE LIGHTNING TALKS

Flip It! Why and How to Flip Your Classroom, Workshop, or Session:

    Based on the book Flip your Classroom by flipped pioneers Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, I plan to share will principles they used in their courses by providing a brief theoretical framework. I will share how I have implemented flipped teaching techniques into my own instruction in a Community College curriculum. I will provide key elements of how I have used flipped techniques and how they have worked and how they have not! In the end, the benefits of using the flipped approach are measurable. I have found that one of the learning outcomes is that students want to take on more responsibility for their own learning. They become more engaged in their learning.

Pinpoint convergence: the information-use tools and skills that link high school and college information literacy curricula

    A 10-minute lighting talk is proposed to share an exploration of the information-use tools and skills that link high school and college information literacy curricula.

A study was conducted in 2012-2013 on information-use tools and skills shared by a high school research curriculum and a first year college research curriculum. The study began with the question: what information knowledge, competencies, skills, and tools are needed for first year college students to begin a successful college career? Data was culled to answer this question from telephone inquiries and open access websites of ten sites across California. The sites included community colleges, small private universities, medium-sized private universities, state universities, large private universities and large public universities. In the lighting talk I will share the distilled data from which emerged a general library instruction curriculum for first year students. This general library instruction curriculum was further refined to pinpoint the specific information seeking skills that are used with specific information tools. The skills and tools used for both online and physical resources were considered. I will further share how these identified skills and tools from the general first year curriculum converge with specific high school assignments from a private high school in Los Angeles. A survey monkey assessment was created to capture the high school students' progression across four years in skill development and knowledge of tools for information tasks. Perhaps most exciting, since 2013, I have been working on a series of online information games to replace the survey monkey assessment.


“I feel more confident going into college”: Getting High School Seniors Ready for Research

    As a college prep school, how do you prepare students to the research they will be expected to do in college? In order to give students a positive college-level research experience before leaving high school, Windward School has been leading juniors and seniors on field trips to UCLA’s libraries and to Los Angeles Public Library’s downtown location. Hear from a high school librarian and a recent MLIS graduate who has reference experience at UCLA and who spent a year working closely with students at Windward School. We will discuss the benefits and challenges of bringing students to visit and do research at large libraries. The benefits to students include the following: students learn to take advantage of the expertise of subject librarians, move from being overwhelmed to being amazed by the vastness of the resources available, and they have the opportunity to discuss their struggles before moving on to college. Additionally, students become adept at using a wide variety of sources and understand how using diverse sources improves the quality of their work. In other words, they learn that good, in-depth research cannot be done by a single Google search. 

Obstacles during this process include dealing with the frustration that arises from only being to use materials on site, and students’ struggle to gain independence in navigating vast online and printed resources. Furthermore, as UCLA’s College library transitions its collection to have fewer print resources, we question how important it will be in the future to continue to request checkout privileges for high school students.

What are the mutual benefits for college and universities to partner with local high schools on research projects? What can universities learn about the habits and attitudes of incoming freshmen and how might working with high school students impact the approach to undergraduate library services? Join us in an exploration of meaningful ways to bridge the gap between high school and college.

Your Forgotten Resource: Public Libraries

POSTER SESSIONS

BEaPRO Digital Literacy / Citizenship Concepts

http://youtu.be/yf0ZzK03jrI
  Supported by Verizon and developed by iKeepSafe experts, the concepts discussed will guide you through six essential concepts for improved digital literacy and citizenship.
1. Balance: Maintaining a healthy balance between work and play, online and offline activities.
2. Ethical Use: Helping kids (students) understand the consequences of ethical choices they make online.
3. Privacy: Protecting personal information and maintaining privacy.
4. Relationships: Engaging safe and healthy relationship with technology as a tool.
5. Reputation: Building a positive online reputation that will contribute to future success.
6. Online Security: Observing good habits for securing hardware and software.

Implementing Information Literacy Instruction in First Year Seminars at California State University, Monterey Bay

    During the 2012 – 2013 academic year our university implemented a set of courses devoted to helping freshman transition from high school to college. First Year Seminars on our campus are interdisciplinary and include courses titled Digital Media Arts & Culture and Archaeology/Sustainability. Amongst the four learning outcomes embedded in the FYS courses is one devoted to information literacy: “Students choose a topic appropriate to the assignment, identify search terms relevant to the topic, effectively search for and identify sources using the library books and articles search tool and evaluate the relevance of search results.” This learning outcome provides librarians and course instructors with an opportunity to collaboratively help students build vital research skills early in their college careers. 

The poster will describe the outreach methods that librarians here have utilized in designing and implementing instruction sessions for First Year Seminars. The poster will also detail the pedagogical methods utilized by librarians in these instruction sessions. The flipped classroom model has been successful in instruction for FYS courses and entails that students complete librarian designed tutorials prior to an instruction session. The tutorials cover basic information literacy concepts, thus allowing students time during the instruction session to refine their understanding of these concepts through active learning activities as well as work on their course projects. 

Through reference to qualitative data (primarily faculty and student responses to questionnaires) the poster will highlight the benefits and challenges of this instruction model. The poster will include recommendations for librarians at institutions that currently have or are developing FYS programs.