ACRL-VWIG & ALA Virtual Communities in Libraries Program
December 13,  2015
CVL Auditorium in Second Life 12:00pm SLT

"Assessing Varied Instruction Approaches in the Instruction of Online Graduate Students"

By Mary Frances.  Library and Information Research. 2014; 38(119):3-12

Available at http://www.lirgjournal.org.uk/lir/ojs/index.php/lir/article/view/642/657

 

Joint meeting with InfoLit Journal Club

 

Discussion leader: Pancha Enzyme (Marshall Dozier) from the University of Edinburgh.

 

 

 

 

Pancha/Marshall, an academic subject librarian, Medicine, at the University of Edinburgh selected this paper for this months discussion as she works extensively with online distance learners at the graduate level.

 

This article assessed the outcomes of two separate interventions designed to develop students’ information literacy in an academic context at a small public university in the United States.  Students in 2 different courses in an online program at the Masters level, 31 students in a Research Methods course and 8 students in an Introduction to Distance Education course.  Two before and after comparison studies: students in the Research Methods course had a pre- and post-test linked to a tutorial activity and differences in scores were measured.  Students in the Introduction group had assignment grades compared to grades from a prior course.

 

 

There were two wholly separate interventions, one for each group: Research Methods had an online asynchronous 3-week course with various learning activities in information literacy; the Introduction intervention was 1-to-1 advice (mostly by email) on selecting and evaluating journal articles.

 

 Research Methods group: 30 out of 31 students maintained or improved their test scores, but no correlation could be found between the various activities and scores, ‘time taken to complete the tutorial varied widely in relation to the scores on the pre-test, worksheet quiz, and post-test. For the Introduction group, the number of contacts from each student ranged from 1 to 7, each email took between 15 and 40 minutes to answer. The main issues that students needed to become more aware of in selecting articles were: currency, identifying peer-reviewed sources, and narrowing the topic sufficiently for the assignment. The students in the Introductory class developed a deeper relationship with faculty members’ as outcome, linked to value placed on collaborative and integrated approach to information literacy.

 

The groups' discussion focused on design elements of the study; questions about the actual "learning" that took place between pre-post tests and concerns about the small number of participants in the study.