Search

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was one of four participating institutions in the Association of American Colleges and Universities' (AAC&U) Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning for Curricular Coherence Project, funded by the Teagle Foundation. The goal of the project was to examine and improve curriculum coherence in undergraduate programs at our institution. A team of UNLV faculty and administrators developed a framework for curricular review and a consultative model to support programs in the process of reviewing and revising their curricula. We implemented this process with the faculty of nine academic programs and assessed the impact of curricular review and revisions at various levels. To assess the impact of the revisions on curricular complexity, we made pre-post comparisons of complexity scores, as calculated by the University of New Mexico's Curricular Analytics platform (Heileman, Slim, Hickman, & Abdallah, 2017). We used a survey adapted from the Concerns Based Adoption Model (George, Hall, & Stiegelbauer, 2006) to evaluate faculty's perceptions of the curricular review and revision process. Finally, we used a custom rubric to qualitatively assess the outcome of the curriculum revisions and level of alignment with project goals. The results showed that, although faculty expressed high levels of confidence and low levels of concern about the curricular changes they proposed, most of the changes were focused on removing structural barriers to student progression and had little impact on curricular complexity. Future efforts should focus on incentivizing more holistic, ambitious, and substantive curricular revision.

Writing programs and academic libraries are frequent collaborators based on shared concerns about writing and research. However, in these collaborative relationships librarians often share their expertise with writing program administrators and individual instructors without developing the information literacy expertise of the majority of writing program instructors. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the library instruction program and the writing program recognized that by facilitating collaborative professional development, they could together provide enhanced support for instructors teaching research-based writing courses. The authors present a case study of their local professional development institute that developed writing instructors' information literacy confidence and expertise. Based on this experience, the authors offer ways that libraries and writing programs can collaborate to develop writing instructors' information literacy expertise so that the instructors are better prepared to integrate research and writing into the writing curriculum and support students' research and writing learning needs.

This study applied a content analysis methodology in two ways to evaluate first-year students' research topics: a rubric to examine proposed topics in terms of scope, development, and the "researchability" of the topic, as well as textual analysis, using ATLAS.ti, to provide an overview of the types of subjects students select for a persuasive research essay. Results indicated that students struggle with defining an appropriate and feasible focus for their topics and that they often select topics related to education, health, and the environment. These findings were used to implement a new information literacy instruction model that better supports student topic development.

Distance educators have special library needs. This article discusses the results of a library needs assessment of distance instructors at the University of Wyoming. Access to resources, use of library instructional services, barriers to distance library use, and perceived gaps in service are all addressed. Follow-up actions, based on survey results, are also discussed. (Contains 6 tables.)

Librarians and writing instructors are longtime allies that share the goal of teaching information literacy (IL). The IL concept, however, has been undertheorized in its relationship to writing pedagogy In [...]

In order to develop best practices for online video library tutorials, this research study used an interview-based research method to investigate usability, findability, and instructional effectiveness. The findings document student learner preferences and are the basis for guidelines for future tutorial development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]