Carrie Papa-Schold was a recipient of one of the two WHSLA 2020 Professional Development Awards. Below, she tells us about her experience at a pre-COVID conference.
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Thank you WHSLA for the grant towards attending the FYE
(First Year Experience) Conference in Washington, D.C. on February 21 – 24,
2020. (Yes, just before Covid hit the
US.)
In my current job at George Williams College (GWC) in
Williams Bay, WI, I am the Assistant Director of Academic Support and
Disability Services. I also help out
with the library as the “campus librarian”.
GWC is part of Aurora University in Aurora, Illinois where the Phillips
Library Director manages of all of the contracts through CARLi. We have a small library (located at one end
of a building on two floors with two fireplaces, 8 computers, three study
tables and seating for an additional 8 more students) that is staffed mostly by
student workers. https://gwc.aurora.edu/academics/library/index.html
In my role, in academic support, I am an academic coach
working with students who are underprepared for college. Most are from low income and first generation
families. The work with the freshmen class is what brought me and my supervisor
to the FYE Conference. The purpose of
the conference is to bring together educators and administrators to teach and
learn about enhancing the first year student experience. I was thrilled to find that about a dozen of
the presentations and poster sessions were on Information Literacy. I was fortunate to attend 3 of them.
Poster sessions (The
following was the one I was most interested in seeing and talking with the
presenter)
Information Literacy Misconception of Students in First-Year Experience
Courses. Michelle Keba. Palm Beach Atlantic University.
This poster was of a study (not yet published) done by
Michell Keba at her institution using the methods from the research article Predictable Information Literacy
Misconception of First-year College Students (Hinchcliffe, Rand, &
Collier, 2018). The original study was
designed to determine if students either lacked knowledge versus misperceived
their information literacy skills using the “misconception inventory”. By identifying common misconceptions,
potential learning outcomes were developed to guide information literacy
instruction. The misconceptions identified
in the Hinchcliffe et al. (2018) article are:
·
Library
o
First year students believe they are supposed to
do their research without assistance
o
First year students perceive the library as only
a place to get books or to study
o
First year students believe that all library
sources and discovery tools are credible
·
Information Access
o
First year students believe that freely
available Internet resources are sufficient for academic work
o
First year students think Google is a sufficient
search tool
o
First year students believe that accessibility
is an indicator of quality
·
Research Process
o
First year students believe that research is a
linear, uni-directional process
o
First year students think that every question
has a single answer
·
Information Literacy
o
First year students believe that they are
information literate
Hinchliffe,
L., Rand, A., & Collier, J. (2018). Predictable Information Literacy
Misconceptions of First-Year College Students. Communications in Information
Literacy, 12(1), 4–18. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1183245
The New Library Session: Forget the Library - Focus on Information. Elizabeth Johns, Kristen Shonborn,
Kristen Welzenbach. Goucher
College. Tinyurl.com/fye20-goucher
Faculty request librarians to teach students about the
library and how to use it. What students
need is how to identify appropriate information sources from the internet to
library databases. This is a shift to
teaching students about information literacy to address the information era
abundant with credible and non-credible information.
Developing Interdepartmental Information Literacy Solutions: The First
Year Experience in the Misinformation Era. Kate Otto, David Lemmons,
& Sherry Larson-Rhodes. Marquette University.
Information is easily accessible through the library,
internet, and social media to name a few.
Students need to learn the value of good information versus bad. Information literacy efforts help to educate
students on how to locate, evaluate, and effectively/ethically use the
information they are accessing regardless where they find the information. Librarians play key role in leading
information literacy efforts.
There are three types of “information”.
1.
Misinformation – unintentional
2.
Disinformation – intentional, false, shared to
cause harm
3.
Mal-information – intentional, true, and harmful
This is a life-skill to be used throughout college and
career.
Education on information literacy can be achieved through
collaborative efforts on campus. The
first step is to define “information literacy” to ensure understanding between
faculty and staff. The Association of
College & Research Libraries Association (ACRL is a section of the American
Library Association) offers guidelines and a framework for information literacy
in higher education that can be used to guide initiatives in the college setting.
Outcomes from
conference attendance:
·
Gathering information on where information
literacy is being taught on campus to identify gaps in student learning
regarding information literacy
·
Created a module on information literacy that
has been incorporated into academic coaching
·
Developing a module for the senior seminar class
on how to effectively locate information post college when they no longer have
access to the subscription databases.
Respectfully submitted by:
Carrie Papa-Schold, MLIS
papaschold at gmail dot com
