Collaboration on Quantitative Literacy: A Successful Case Study
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation (20 minute presentation)
Target Audience
Higher Education
Location
Room 1220 B
Proposal
As part of a Quality Enhancement Plan for the University of Texas at San Antonio, a quantitative literacy program was established that affected all classes in the core curriculum. In order to comply with the program, freshman composition classes had to incorporate data searching and quantitative skills into one of their papers each semester. In order to meet the needs of students who were unaccustomed to creating graphs and writing about numbers and to help with instructors who were unfamiliar with teaching these skills, the librarian assigned to our department and I collaborated on a Blackboard module about incorporating quantitative elements in freshman papers. The multi-media module covered data searching through the library’s databases, choosing the best dataset for their paper topics, how to create, label, and caption a graph correctly, and how to write about the graph using independent redundancy. Collaboration with a librarian was crucial to this process; screencasts eliminated the need for individual classroom instruction, and developing a blackboard module that any faculty could drop into their course helped instructors who were leery of the new program. This project helped advance information literacy for the freshman at UTSA—and the faculty in the Writing Program.
Short Description
A librarian and a faculty member collaborated on a Blackboard module designed to help students research, interpret, and write about data. This collaboration benefited not only the students, but also faculty who might not have felt confident with teaching data searching and interpretation.
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Frasier, Christina C., "Collaboration on Quantitative Literacy: A Successful Case Study" (2015). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 29.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2015/2015/29
Collaboration on Quantitative Literacy: A Successful Case Study
Room 1220 B
As part of a Quality Enhancement Plan for the University of Texas at San Antonio, a quantitative literacy program was established that affected all classes in the core curriculum. In order to comply with the program, freshman composition classes had to incorporate data searching and quantitative skills into one of their papers each semester. In order to meet the needs of students who were unaccustomed to creating graphs and writing about numbers and to help with instructors who were unfamiliar with teaching these skills, the librarian assigned to our department and I collaborated on a Blackboard module about incorporating quantitative elements in freshman papers. The multi-media module covered data searching through the library’s databases, choosing the best dataset for their paper topics, how to create, label, and caption a graph correctly, and how to write about the graph using independent redundancy. Collaboration with a librarian was crucial to this process; screencasts eliminated the need for individual classroom instruction, and developing a blackboard module that any faculty could drop into their course helped instructors who were leery of the new program. This project helped advance information literacy for the freshman at UTSA—and the faculty in the Writing Program.
