Changing the Way We Teach the First-Year Research Project: Intense Collaboration between Reference Librarians and Composition Instructors

Type of Presentation

Panel (1 hour and 15 minutes presentation total for two or more presenters)

Target Audience

Higher Education

Location

Room 218/220

Abstract

When first-year composition students face the traditional research paper, they often struggle to fully engage with the research process. What would happen if reference librarians worked intensively with composition instructors to help students better understand scholarly research? Normally, at Eastern Florida State College, composition students attend one library instruction during the semester to strengthen their informational literacy skills and prepare them to conduct research for the remainder of their academic careers. Our research instruction pilot program changes the current methods in place for library instruction in composition courses and includes the reference librarians as an integral part of the learning process.

Our pilot program measures the success of students who receive the benefit of intensive instruction from the reference librarians against those students who receive one classroom-based library session. Our panel will present our collaboration (two instructors and two librarians) over one semester (spring, 2015). We will discuss the particulars of the intensive library instruction, present results of a research pre-test and post-test, and wrap up with our assessment of the process. We expect the students who are exposed to the instructional collaboration to show improvement in the quality of the overall research project. However, we also hope to see a change in the attitudes and confidence levels of those students; this difference in attitude may be cause enough for all composition courses to consider intensive collaborative strategies when tasked with teaching the research paper. Our panel will provide conference participants “real-life” examples of research assignments utilizing our collaborative model.

Presentation Description

What would happen if reference librarians worked intensively with composition instructors to help students better understand scholarly research? We created a pilot program at EFSC to answer that very question. Our panel will present the results of our collaboration (two instructors and two librarians) and will provide conference participants “real-life” examples of research assignments utilizing our collaborative model.

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

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Sep 25th, 2:45 PM Sep 25th, 4:00 PM

Changing the Way We Teach the First-Year Research Project: Intense Collaboration between Reference Librarians and Composition Instructors

Room 218/220

When first-year composition students face the traditional research paper, they often struggle to fully engage with the research process. What would happen if reference librarians worked intensively with composition instructors to help students better understand scholarly research? Normally, at Eastern Florida State College, composition students attend one library instruction during the semester to strengthen their informational literacy skills and prepare them to conduct research for the remainder of their academic careers. Our research instruction pilot program changes the current methods in place for library instruction in composition courses and includes the reference librarians as an integral part of the learning process.

Our pilot program measures the success of students who receive the benefit of intensive instruction from the reference librarians against those students who receive one classroom-based library session. Our panel will present our collaboration (two instructors and two librarians) over one semester (spring, 2015). We will discuss the particulars of the intensive library instruction, present results of a research pre-test and post-test, and wrap up with our assessment of the process. We expect the students who are exposed to the instructional collaboration to show improvement in the quality of the overall research project. However, we also hope to see a change in the attitudes and confidence levels of those students; this difference in attitude may be cause enough for all composition courses to consider intensive collaborative strategies when tasked with teaching the research paper. Our panel will provide conference participants “real-life” examples of research assignments utilizing our collaborative model.