1. UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH NEEDS: FACULTY-LIBRARIAN COLLABORATION TO IMPROVE INFORMATION LITERACY IN POLICY PAPERS.
- Author
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Pautz, Michelle and Gauder, Heidi
- Subjects
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POLITICAL science research , *ENVIRONMENTAL policy research , *INFORMATION literacy research , *REFERENCE librarians , *LIBRARIANS - Abstract
After many semesters of teaching an upper division political science elective in environmental policy and frustration with the end product of a semester long policy project, it occurred to me that a significant part of the problem was the type of sources and the kinds of information that students were utilizing. After a series of discussions with the reference librarian for political science, I came to hypothesize that poor student information literacy might be the problem. Accordingly, a reference librarian and I decided to test this hypothesis and see if the underlying issue was subpar information literacy. Instead of the traditional model of a faculty member sending his/her students to the library to get information (c.f. Marfleet and Dille 2005), we decided to work together before the semester began to redo the entire policy project and to continue those collaborative efforts throughout the semester. While there are still changes we would make, we have been pleased with the outcomes of our collaboration over the course of two different semesters in which the project was implemented in the environmental policy course. After analyzing citations in two different sets of papers, we note a remarkable increase in the number of sources students used in their project and in the quality of the sources employed. Ultimately, we have found that when a faculty member works with a librarian throughout the semester, it is better and our collaboration has improved the information literacy of our students, and therefore, the finished product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016