Purpose & Goals

The university library has a long-standing partnership with the first-year writing course. In a typical year the course enrolls approximately 2000 students, with the libraries engaging with 96% of the students. In the past four years, we have tried many collaboration models, including facilitating curriculum-based information literacy activities, providing assignment feedback, teaching a single-session workshop (one-shot) and consulting with instructors to empower them to deliver the IL instruction themselves. The choice of collaboration model can depend on the libraries’ and the writing course staff's capacity, logistics, timing and curriculum buy-in. One persistent internal conversation focuses on the learning outcomes and impact of the libraries’ instruction. To answer this question, we collected end-of-class feedback from first year writing students in the Fall of 2023 and Spring 2024. Specifically, we seek to answer the following questions: How do the students “lessons learned” map onto the course and session objectives? What patterns appear in the responses to the questions about what they already knew and the remaining questions? Are the results different for the course sections with the embedded librarians and one-class?

Design & Methodology

Two different groups of students completed the feedback survey: a smaller section of students who were in sections with embedded librarians (librarians provide feedback on 3 assignments and teach a live class on finding and evaluating sources) and a larger group of students with a single-session information literacy workshop (100-minute class on finding and evaluating sources). At the end of the session the students completed a short survey via QR Code or link asking them about what they already knew on the topic, what they learned, and what questions they still had (a KWL activity).

Findings

While the data collection for the Spring semester is still ongoing, the preliminary results point to limited differences between the sections with different library partnership models and also within the groups. Preliminary data suggests that students recall information related to learning outcomes covered at the beginning or end of the workshop, rather than the content in the middle of the session. Data also suggests that nearly all students are able to identify something new that they learned, but this varies based on their prior experience with information literacy and the research process.

Action & Impact

Based on the findings, we plan to use this data to develop a more effective pre-class assignment to assess prior knowledge to focus the workshop session. Additionally, we plan to use the data on what students identified as areas that are unclear to adjust the workshop curriculum and post-class resources. On the staff side, we plan to use the student feedback data to address ways to enhance our teaching practices in a workshop setting including connecting the student feedback to a peer observation of teaching model with our cohort of instructors.

Practical Implications & Value

Practical implications of this work include reflecting on how we can build consistent feedback channels and contribute to the larger understanding of how course integration models can work.