Toolkit
Some Practical Ideas for Improving Undergraduate Library Research
Generally, college students are comfortable with technology but they are not information-fluent.
Nor do they understand the disciplinary structures that are so familiar to their professors as to seem self-evident.
As the social sciences librarian in a traditional college of arts and sciences, every semester I see how the resulting disconnect between undergraduate and professorial information-seeking behavior affects students and the quality of their research.
I developed these tools to contribute to closing this gap.
- To offer another perspective on how students approach finding information.
- To suggest why the undergraduate approach is so different from methods that seasonede academics use in information gathering.
- To provide concrete suggestions that may help faculty to guide students toward better library research
How the Pace of Technological Change Affects Information-Seeking
If you are like many professors, your most intense exposure to library research was probably when you were working on the literature review for your dissertation. If more than three or four years have passed, things have changed dramatically.
Find the year in which you spent the most time in the library. Then follow the timeline to its end to see how much things have changed and what the implications of those changes are for your information-seeking students today.
Understanding Undergraduate Information- Seeking Behavior
Think of the academic disciplines as temples around a marketplace. Long, slippery marble staircases ascend to the temples. Faculty have climbed the steps (graduate school, dissertations, perhaps tenure) and been fully initiated into their disciplines. In fact, they are high priests and priestesses.
Undergraduates–and particularly first year students–are milling around in the marketplace at the bottom of all the stairs. They probably don’t understand the disciplinary structure of higher education. They probably aren’t sure which temple at which they want to worship. (What’s your major?) They may or may not decide to begin the demanding climb to the priesthood. They are a long way from being fully initiated into academia and this affects how they seek information and pursue research assignments.
“Help! I can’t find anything on my topic!”
How to Effectively Assist Frustrated Undergraduates: Some Tips for Faculty
“Where in the world do they find this awful stuff?”
Some Suggestions for Library Assignments to Improve Undergraduate Research
June 27th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
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