Starting with the WHY: #ccourses Unit 1

The first activity for #ccourses is looking at the why of why we teach. As Mike Wesch says on the #ccourses site:

We usually start by addressing the “What” question first. We have a course title or subject area and we begin populating our syllabus with the “whats” to be learned. Or, we peruse textbooks looking for the text that we think best covers the field. If we have time, we address the “How” question by considering how we can best teach the material. We sharpen our teaching technique, seek out better examples for the more difficult concepts, compile photos and videos to improve our presentations, and seek other ways to get the students engaged with the material. We may jump to incorporate the latest tools and techniques, whether it is social or interactive media or a new technique like a flipped classroom.  Our syllabus, teaching materials, and educational technology in order, we rush into the semester, rarely asking, “Why?”

As a librarian teaching library research skills / information literacy (IL), my first inclination would be to say that I'm motivated to teach students because IL prepares individuals to become active members in a participatory democracy, questioning the status quo, and knowing how to find and use quality information.

This grounding also prepares students to become creators and critics of knowledge, rather than just consumers. I think this latter point especially resonates with me. IL can pair with any discipline to help students find their voice within their chosen area of interest. I also find this near and dear personally from growing up reading, making, and distributing zines, DIY music, and cultural/community events. I felt my personal interests brought me into Freire's notion of "critical consciousness," and once I discovered the library on my own as an undergrad, I finally started to become interested in my courses because I could see how my learning was applying to my life.

Prior to that awakening, I was a disconnected and uninterested student through most of high school and most of college as an undergrad. I dropped out for awhile at one point, planning to never go back. When I did go back to school, I was just going through the motions until about my last year when I started to become energized about learning. I think this strongly affects my perspective on teaching and learning as an educator now.

In my current position, I am the faculty librarian liaison to retention* efforts across campus, so I am always reflecting back on my experiences and how that might apply to current students considering dropping out. Though, as a fairly privileged white, middle class, cisgender and hetero lady, my experiences definitely do not translate to many on campus. However, I feel like I at least have more awareness of issues surrounding retention. So in my work with these groups, my why especially leads me to think about helping students feel connected on campus, on feeling like they can get access to knowledge and information in the library that affects their lives on a personal level and that they can tie that into their studies.

Really excited about what's to come with #ccourses, taking this approach to instruction is so important.

*And of course retention does not mean only students who don't want to be in school. Students who are affected by circumstances out of their control make staying in college difficult, as well as students who might be high achievers who feel disconnected or disappointed and would want to transfer. "Retention" can apply to all types of students with varying circumstances and needs.

Adding another piece to the library + student retention puzzle

image from www.businesscontinuityjournal.com

Grit has become a big, flashy word over the last year or so, in regards to instilling adaptive learning in students and building resiliency. The idea is that students who are able to adapt and bounce back from failure are able to learn from mistakes, being more likely to stick around in school when they are faced with challenges.

In looking at educational psychology literature, and is becoming more widely known through research on positive effects of gaming, experiencing failure supports adaptive learning. Rohrkemper and Corno (1988) highlight the problematic duality of failure versus success, where failure is always bad and success is always good. This in fact is not true, where constant success can be detrimental and failure can improve performance (that is, learning from failure). Focusing on how students think, rather than what they know, is one step in the right direction, along with modeling adaptive behavior, and teaching students to understand that tasks and learning can be malleable. In library instruction, this reminds me of what Pegasus Librarian (I believe?) mentioned in regards to providing students with a "dirt-view" of research (I can't find this post, I'm thinking it could have possibly been an episode on Adventures in Library Instruction). But basically, where we show students research takes work and builds on failure, and it's almost hilarious when we show students practiced, perfect searches because that is not how research works at all. Kluger and DeNisi (1996) support this notion of learning through failure by arguing that after doing an enormous meta-analysis of feedback interventions research, the conclusion is that the feedback literature is inconclusive and highly variable based on situations and learners involved. They explain that learners are most successful in learning through discovery, rather than feedback, particularly controlling feedback (ahem, grades).

Brownell (1947) advocated for teaching meaning in arithmetic, typically a rote, "tool subject." You'd think the argument of teaching meaning would be quite clear, especially in 2013, but this debate continues in some ways. We can see the shift in information literacy, it seems there is more agreement now to move away from navigation and clicks ("bibliographic instruction") to teaching students a more holistic understanding of research in "information literacy." Barbara Fister, as always, is very eloquent in how she explains the importance of this. But really this is another avenue to instill resiliency in students, by focusing on higher order thinking (though, higher order thinking is not always appropriate in every context), we truly are looking toward students' process rather than having interest only in final product. As Brownell explains, teaching meaning provides a greater context for students to find value in the particular subject being taught. With all the difficulty librarians can have regarding one shots (this model could/should change) in building connections with students and improving motivation for students to learn aspects of the research process, providing deeper knowledge about why, and not just what and how, can improve the learning environment.

I was going to next talk about how to provide successful feedback, because it is important, but to avoid making this post so long that no one actually reads it, I just want to wrap up with whether in a class (credit-bearing, one-shot) or through more auxiliary approaches, libraries should be places for students to build grit and resiliency through exploring failure. We talk about how orientations are important for students to develop a social connection and feel comfortable somewhere on campus, and this is a very important aspect of retention, but these safe spaces should also provide opportunities for students to take safe risks and learn how to adapt to failure. This doesn't necessarily mean libraries need to gamify the whole library or offer badges as a panacea for solving student retention or student motivation concerns, but these are examples of methods that could prove useful. Setting up other opportunities in the library for students to test out ideas are ways in which to draw them in and instill adaptivity. Hopefully they are also getting opportunities for safe failure in their campus-wide courses, but it's certainly not a guarantee. Libraries should think about how we can provide opportunities for safe risk in a variety of ways, whether it's instruction, programming, collections, or UX. It's one step in figuring out how we can support student retention initiatives on campus and demonstrate value.

--
Brownell, W. A. (January 01, 1947). The Place of Meaning in the Teaching of Arithmetic.The Elementary School Journal, 47, 5, 256-265.

Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (January 01, 1996). The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 2, 254-284.

Rohrkemper, M., & Corno, L. (January 01, 1988). Success and Failure on Classroom Tasks: Adaptive Learning and Classroom Teaching. The Elementary School Journal, 88,3, 297-312.

TMI Instruction and Student Retention

In my Educational Psychology course I'm taking this semester, we were discussing effectiveness of instructor transparency on student motivation. Because people ascribe more positive attributes to others who appear "warm" (rather than "cold"), it seemed like it could be a good thing to be forthcoming with personal information to students. For example, how an instructor had a hard time learning x subject and overcame it, or even addressing if an instructor received negative reviews on TCEs, etc. My opinion was to not show much weakness. You can really hurt your credibility with students who are looking to you as an expert on a topic and the authority figure for the classroom if you try to take yourself down a few notches to be on the same level as them. It sort of makes me think of He's Hip. He's Cool. He's 45! From Kids in the Hall:

Edit: @kellymce pointed out this is another good example (and a much better one, I think!):

Students can sniff out a try-hard. Sometimes I'm tempted to share, particularly when I'm working with student retention-related groups, that I dropped out of college for awhile and also hated using the library and didn't care to ever learn. But I don't! Because I'm supposed to be the authority in the class and I'm in charge. Can you imagine if you went to a therapist and they started telling you about all their psychological issues? Their credibility would be shot, and it would also be very confusing as to why they are sharing this information. As instructors, we are there to teach a particular subject and guide students to learning. We can relate to them in small ways, in a mentor-ish capacity, but emptying out the closet skeletons is not an effective way to motivate or draw students into learning.

Anyhow, these are my thoughts and I realize how strong they are after reading this article that came out today on Inside Higher Ed: TMI from Professors (study indicates role of over-sharing by professors in encouraging uncivil student behavior). Apparently, students are less likely to behave well in class if you try and rap with them (as in the outdated 70s slang for talk/relate to). Check it out, interesting stuff.

"When students reported that their instructors engaged in a lot of sharing about their lives -- particularly stories about past academic mistakes, even stories designed to stress that everyone has difficulty learning some topics -- there is an immediate and negative impact on classroom attitudes."

Reflection on Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (book)

image from powderroom.jezebel.com

I just finished reading Maria T. Accardi's Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Library Juice Press, edited by Emily Drabinski). Aside from it resonating with me because I do try to employ critical library instruction and feminist pedagogy when I can, a lot of what Accardi discusses in the book also relates to what I'm doing with digital badges and also student retention.

First, for some background, Accardi explains that feminist pedagogy resides within critical pedagogy. Feminist pedagogy might carry the misconception of being instruction about women and feminism. Although it can often be related to that and employed in women's studies courses, it can be integrated in any form of curriculum. It typically exposes students to issues hidden in society, particularly injustices based on race, class, ability, sexual orientation, etc., and of course gender. Accardi quotes bell hooks (1994) for a concise description: "Feminist teaching techniques are anti-hierarchical, student-centered, promote community and collaboration, validate experiential knowledge, discourage passivity, and emphasize well being and self-actualization" (hooks in Accardi, p.31). To explain this further, it's to help students develop a critical consciousness and be able to take action on their learning.

So I wanted to look at some of the work I'm doing through this lens after this book made me think more clearly about what I am trying to accomplish.

Digital Badges: one of the issues I'm really struggling with for our badges are in scalability. There is a conflict between reaching many with limited FTE (meaning having automatic assessments that don't require intervention) versus reaching fewer, but retaining the ability to provide meaningful feedback and interact with students. One thing about badges is that typically they are awarded for rigid criteria. In a sense they need to be because a badge means something specific and ascribes value to a particular skill. So, if you have no concrete way of measuring this skill to determine if a badge was "rightfully earned" or not, what does it even mean if anyone or no one can actually obtain it? On the other hand, I believe students need to create their own learning and be proactive (feminist pedagogy), and I don't believe there should necessarily be an authority figure telling them what is right or wrong in absolute terms. Obviously, I know more about information literacy than they do, so I would need to develop content, etc., but as Accardi explains, feminist pedagogy is about being a guide and a facilitator rather than an all-knowing "sage-on-the-stage." A lot of the badges I have created focus on affective outcomes, students developing their own meaning of content, and opportunities for reflection and relating material to students' own lived experience. It's difficult enough to measure this as it is, let alone within the more rigid confines of a badge rubric. Not all badges need to be this way, but when attempting to design a suite of badges for campus, making as many automatic as possible without intervention on a 40k campus with 10 FTE instruction librarians tends to be more desirable. Using an automatic multiple choice quiz to determine skill acquisition is an easy, yet banking-model-esque method to award badges at scale. So something here I am trying to figure out is how to use feminist pedagogy but be simultaneously efficient? I'm working on some ideas for this, but it's certainly a point for discussion. How do you reconcile this in your teaching, particularly when instruction is for high numbers of students?

Student Retention: another area that I focus on. How conflicting that student retention is measured in rigid, big data and explained ROI, but it turns out some of the most effective methods to retain students include providing opportunities for personalization, social involvement, and affective learning outcomes. A lot of the instruction I do, and particularly for student success courses and "at-risk" groups includes promoting greater awareness and comfort in the library, rather than an explicit focus on content. I think student retention work would benefit greatly from feminist pedagogy, as would library instruction in general based on the high anxiety many students feel when using the library (and as Accardi does touch on).

This is my brief rundown of my most current thoughts from reading this book. I thought it was a great introduction to understanding feminist pedagogy and how it can be applied to library instruction. Accardi talked about her experience with the ACRL Immersion Program and also talked about issues with ACRL Standards, which I'd like to address in another post.

#ala2013 recap: Badges, student retention, and over-capacity parties

Wow #ala2013 went by so fast! This was hands down my favorite conference that I've been to over the last 3 years. Here's my brief recap of highlights:

I didn't attend as many sessions as I would have liked; I presented twice, led a discussion group, and reviewed people's resumes for NMRT's Resume Review Service, so a lot of my time was already nailed down, but it was all stuff I wanted to do so it worked out.

Gamification
On Saturday morning, I presented on the LITA: What to know before gamifying your library panel. We had a range of topics including: Bohyun Kim (moderator) giving an overview of gamification; Dave Pattern's use of Library Game / Library Lemontree at the University of Huddersfield (UK); Annie Pho covering the not-fun-but-very-important stuff on how to create institutional buy in and obtain grant money for these sorts of projects; and Young Lee explaining the technology aspects involved and how he plans to use badges in a law school library. My presentation was titled, "Anchoring the badge: Setting standards for game-based learning in library instruction." I discussed my current implementation of badges for instruction at The University of Arizona Libraries. You can see the Slideshare presentation with everyone's slides; though, since it was such a large panel not all of us contributed slides (myself included). So you won't get much from what I discussed in that link. Here is a very brief summary below; I am sure I will be speaking and writing about this project more as it progresses (have IRB approval!), so I plan to share more information in the near future.

Importance and benefits of using badges for instruction:

• Makes instruction more scalable, can ensure wider adoption of IL skills: trackable, measurable
• With trackability and assessment built in, this presents possibilities for customized learning ("microcredentialing," demonstrate specific skills; customization can greatly improve motivation and learning)
• Evidence is tied to the idea of competency-based learning (use specific outcomes to show criteria has been met for assessment, accreditation, program SLOs, other standards like the ACRL IL Standards, etc.)
• What we are doing at the University of Arizona: my overview was very brief since I'm still currently studying this and have gotten IRB approval to do so

I left those in attendance with some thoughts from Dan Hickey of Indiana University, via a Campus Technology article, How badges really work in higher education:

• "What sorts of claims will your badges make about the earners and what evidence will your badges contain to support those claims? 
• What assumptions about learning will frame your consideration and implementation of badges?
• How will your badges program be introduced? Will it be a centralized effort or pockets of innovation? "

You can read more about badges and gamification in academic libraries from what I have published in ACRL TechConnect on initial plans for badges at the UA Libraries, as well as our use of SCVNGR back in a pilot:

• Test-driving Purdue's Passport platform for library instruction

• Taking a trek with SCVNGR: Developing asynchronous, mobile orientations and instruction for campus

Char Booth also has a great post on badges at her blog, Info-mational, looking at badging in higher ed and discussing how she is using this form of micro-credentialing in the ACRL Immersion Teaching with Technology track. See her post, MYOB: Make your own badge.

More on Badges for Instruction
On Sunday, I presented a Conversation Starter with Annie Pho and Young Lee: Achievement unlocked: Motivating and assessing user learning with digital badges. Our hashtag was #alabadge, and you can see some helpful Tweets summarizing the session.

Tweets about "alabadge"

Student Retention
On Saturday, I also co-facilitated my and Jaime Hammond's ACRL Student Retention Discussion Group meeting.  You can also find the group on ALA Connect. Our topic for this meeting was:

How do we measure causation versus correlation in the library’s role in student success and retention? The ACRL Student Retention Discussion Group will be discussing the impact of a “culture of assessment” on libraries and demonstrating value on campus in regards to retention. We will discuss how effective demonstration of value in campus retention is through traditional methods and hope to explore ideas participants have for new initiatives.

To help guide the discussion, we used Megan Oakleaf's article on assessment strategies:

Oakleaf, M. (March 01, 2013). Building the Assessment Librarian Guildhall: Criteria and Skills for Quality Assessment. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39, 2, 126-128.  

We had some great discussions about what people are doing at their institutions, and seemed to have a good mix of academic librarians from community colleges and universities. The minutes should be posted within the next week or so; if this interests you, joining the Connect group will keep you up to speed. We also organize monthly article discussions during the regular academic year, with volunteers choosing articles and facilitating.


Misc
Other things included the Librarian Wardrobe + Every Library After Hours Party, which will have a solid recap on Librarian Wardrobe soon. We had a great time helping to raise awareness and $$ for Every Library, and so excited to plan more events with them at future conferences. Apologies to anyone who could not get into the party, it's very, very hard to find venues that allow for a large capacity without charging tons of money that neither LW or EL have to spare. We do have plans to accommodate more of everyone for #ala2014.


There was a lot of other great stuff but I'm going to stop there since this is already getting pretty long. I had a lot of fun spending time with friends and meeting new people at this conference. In the meantime, I am getting ready to go to ACRL Immersion in Seattle later this month for Program Track and have some other, exciting projects in progress as well. Check back here for more updates on badges and other stuff!

Library Skills for Academic Integrity

In an effort to improve retention rates and let students learn from their mistakes, the university now issues sanctions for students to attend mandatory, multi-part workshops when caught plagiarizing, instead of immediate expulsion. This is really great, because a lot of the time plagiarism is not intentional. Students may have procrastinated and just sloppily put a paper together at the last minute. This way, they can learn better study skills and what plagiarism really is instead of just being kicked out. It's really up to the faculty member and how s/he wants to handle it, but the Dean of Students Office has a general outline to follow.

Since this falls under student retention, it's my area, and although we have worked with the Dean of Students Office in the past to deliver a standalone library component workshop for the series, I am working with Student Affairs and the tutoring center to revamp this model. The Dean of Students Office presents their own workshop on what academic integrity is and the UA's honor code. Then, the tutoring center has hired a Graduate Assistant (GA) from Education to teach the three hour workshop on study skills and putting knowledge of what plagiarism is into practice. So my portion will be embedded within improving study skills and how to write a paper. We're using the train-the-trainer approach here once again though to keep it scalable since there are about 10-15 workshops per semester. So I will be training the GA, and delivering the first session or two, then he will deliver the library portion along with what he is already covering while I observe, and then he takes it from there. We will be checking in throughout the semester and plan to re-assess before summer.

The Dean of Students is also hoping to offer this to the campus community at large for anyone interested, caught plagiarizing or not. So, I will be working with the tutoring center to market this workshop to a wider audience. I am also hoping to tie this into the Libraries' badging system in the works. This workshop, or a component of it, could be a challenge or a badge in itself.

As far as the instruction goes, the last thing these students want, I'm sure, after feeling irritated, uncomfortable, and probably embarrassed about attending these sessions, is someone standing up there scolding them and making them memorize searching skills, library jargon, and dos and don'ts. I'm trying to make my portion for library skills fun and relatable, showing them it's actually pretty easy to not plagiarize. My thoughts are most have procrastinated, slopped a paper together at the last minute, and then thought having a list of references at the end would suffice. I don't believe the majority of these students intentionally plagiarized with the hope that others' work would be passed off as their own. I really do think they just wanted to get their assignment done for a class they might not think will affect them in the long run. I was not the best student during most of undergrad, so I can certainly relate to those feelings.

Here is my pretty-close-to-final draft of the Libraries' portion of instruction for these workshops. The presenters' notes, which you probably can't see through SlideShare, have more detail on what I'll be covering in each slide.

Library skills for academic integrity from Nicole Pagowsky

Meme-themed CRAAP Test

As part of my work in identifying and supporting student retention/success efforts on campus, I have been providing workshops to athletes as part of their mandatory study table hours. This semester, I am working with the football players and just finished up my second visit with them. We are really only given a half hour since they are busy getting homework done, and oftentimes, attention spans are short. This means I have to plan out lessons that are quick and to the point, and preferably engaging and hands-on as well.

I plotted out the three sessions to cover topics at point-of-need in the semester. First, a colleague and I went over library resources available to them and how to get started with research (catalog and databases). This session was directly tied to assignments in classes the majority of the athletes take in their first semester. The session I covered this week was evaluating sources, and the final session next month will be on citations and avoiding plagiarism. The latter two sessions are not directly tied to a particular assignment, so the challenge is to get their attention and make the workshops relevant.

Since over the summer, the competition was fierce when we used a BINGO-like game to teach the athletes about library services available to them, I figured using a game again would appeal to the football players. The plan was to review search tips from the first session briefly, cover the importance of evaluating sources, show the students the CRAAP Test from CSU Chico, and then with these skills, let them loose on the game.

Students were broken up into groups of 3 (out of a 24-person class), and each team was given a different meme. The athletes would need to use their newly-acquired searching skills to find a source that explains what their meme means, and then use the CRAAP Test to determine if the source is credible or not. The first team(s) to finish, and then accurately explain their meme and credibility of their source would win candy (bribes do help).

From http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/212976

They seemed to perk up a bit when I mentioned memes. Some of them weren't sure what they were at first, but once they saw an example, they knew. Because it was such a short session, it was acceptable for them to use web sources. This made it easier for them to explain the meme but seemed more difficult for them to assess credibility. Also, in assigning different memes to each team, some of the ones chosen were more difficult to explain than others, so this gave an unfair advantage to certain groups. I tried to choose ones with cultural or historical significance that would have more content available when researching, but this wasn't always successful. Another issue was students simply locating pieces of information on the site and then regurgitating this on their worksheet, rather than using critical thinking skills to examine credibility. After noticing this, I made an announcement to think critically about what they're finding: instead of just writing down the year of publication or author name, think about if having more recent information on the topic is essential, or what affiliations and expertise the author has.

Using this lesson a second time with pre-business freshmen in an MIS class, the colleague I delivered the instruction with to the athletes and I instead required using the CRAAP Test on library resources only, requiring the students to search the databases. A problem with memes and researching pop culture of course is that it's brand new, so it's not likely there are scholarly sources. We permitted use of news articles instead because of this. Because of the class and revision of the lesson plan, it seemed to be more successful the second time around.

And today was the third trial with this lesson, on the second section of the MIS class. Instead of assigning a different meme to each group, I chose the two memes most conducive to research, divided the class in half, and then broke each half into teams of three. The first team in group 1 to explain the meme and source credibility would win, as would the first team in group 2 to do so. This went much more smoothly and it generated more possibility for discussion when groups explained their results.

I have to say, after working with the athletes especially, my classroom management skills are really taking off.... dealing with students not paying attention, talking, doing other homework.... I'm finding a silent pause with direct eye contact, asking discussion questions so students have to pay attention to each other if not me, and saying stuff like "come on guys, really? this is to help you finish your homework faster" seems to help a little. I think the library instruction sessions will always be perceived as boring and irrelevant by a number of students, unfortunately (I certainly thought so for a good portion of my undergrad years), but if we can mix things up with games and interactivity, it definitely can start to change those perceptions.

Lesson plan - Original - added in more discussion of aspects of CRAAP Test: students seemed unsure about certain terminology, like currency, relevance, and authority

Individual handouts

Group activity - memes - Original before revising to only include library resources and handing out only the memes: casually pepper spray everything cop and Neil deGrasse Tyson reaction