1. K-16 Learning Continuums: The Structured Path to the Information Literate College Student Sandy Jenkins & Carol Smith, University of Central Missouri (UCM) MASL Conference, April 18, 2010
9. Standards Level Standard K-12 Standards for the 21 st –Century Learner (AASL, 2007) College Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ACRL, 2000) Technology National Educational Technology Standards for Students (ISTE, 2007) DESE Communication Arts GLEs & CLEs (2010)
31. C. Ask my building principal to include me as an agenda item for the beginning of the year teachers’ meeting. D. Approach individual teachers to develop collaboration activities. Based on what you heard today and what you already know about your students, teachers, and administrators, what will you do to support students in the transition from high school to college? Final Clicker Question! ~M31 ~M32 ~M33 ~M34 ~M35 ~M11 ~M12 ~M13 ~M14 ~M15 ~M16 ~M17 ~M18 ~M19 ~M20 ~M36 ~M37 ~M38 ~M39 ~M40 ~M21 ~M22 ~M23 ~M24 ~M25 ~M1 ~M2 ~M3 ~M4 ~M5 ~M26 ~M27 ~M28 ~M30 ~M29 ~M6 ~M7 ~M8 ~M10 ~M9 ~NR Response Total A/1 B/2 B. Contact my regional academic library and ask to start a partnership. C/3 D/4 E/5 E. Nothing – my situation won’t allow me to accomplish much. A. Advocate in my district for a K-16 continuum model. ~PA1% ~PA2% ~PA3% ~PA4% ~PA5%
CAROL Hello everybody, welcome. My name is Carol Smith. I’m a business librarian at the James C. Kirkpatrick Library, at the University of Central Missouri. May I first ask – did anyone in the room attend our presentation last year? The title of our presentation last year was “Your High School Senior is My College Freshman!” If you did attend that session, please know that the good MASL conference folk asked us to come back this year and give an encore presentation, so while we’ve updated and expanded some of our information, you will largely find that our material covers similar ground. I’d also like to mention at the outset that we created a web-based resource guide to accompany this presentation, and other than a small card we’re going to hand out at the end of the session with the website url on it, we don’t have any other handouts. You can take notes if you’d like, but all resources we mention will be listed in the resource guide; indeed the entire ppt will be available on the website, and we’re going to record audio to accompany that powerpoint and post it sometime next week Okay, so we’re here today to talk about how college and school librarians can work together to help future college students acquire the information management skills they need in order to succeed during their undergraduate years and beyond. Incoming college freshmen are expected to arrive on campus armed with basic competencies in the identification, location, and evaluation of information. But despite their reputation as technology and information-savvy “Millennials”, research shows that first-year college students are often unprepared for academic-level research. Some 75% of high school seniors will go on to college, but half of those students will NOT end up earning a degree. And In today’s information-intensive world, a significant contributing factor to that high college dropout rate is the inability of students to find and use information effectively.”
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CAROL Okay, let’s start by talking about what incoming first year students actually know.
CAROL Are you ready to fire up your clickers? But wait - before you answer the question on this slide, let me give you the setup. NITLE, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, created a wonderful “Research Practices Survey” a few years back, to evaluate both students’ self-perceptions about their information literacy skills, and their actual knowledge. It’s available for anyone to use under a Creative Commons license. It’s such a good survey instrument that Sandy has used portions of it as a pre- and post-test survey in the research skills course she teaches, and I’ve used it in research studies related to information literacy instruction in courses taught in Second Life, the virtual environment. Anyway - undergraduates at all NITLE member institutions took this survey in both 2006 and 2007. The collective results are available only to NITLE members, but at least one college – Barnard College – has posted results on the open web for all to see. So, using your clickers, I’d like you to select the answer you think that most students chose for this question. (discuss answer) http://www.barnard.edu/library/assessment/pretest.htm Okay, are you ready to fire up your clickers? But wait - before you answer the question on this slide, let me give you the setup. NITLE, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, created a wonderful “ Research Practices Survey ” a couple of years back, to evaluate both students ’ self-perceptions about their information literacy skills, and their actual knowledge. It ’ s available for anyone to use under a Creative Commons license, and Sandy actually uses portions of it as a pre- and post-test survey in the research skills course she teaches. Anyway, undergraduates at all NITLE member institutions took this survey in both 2006 and 2007. The collective results are available only to NITLE members, but at least one college – Barnard College – has posted results on the open web. I ’ d like you to select the answer you think that most students chose for this question. (discuss answer)
CAROL Okay, and here’s another question on that survey. How do you think most students answered this question? (discuss answer)
CAROL Here are the Barnard college student responses to both questions, side by side. The contrast is startling, but typical for the entire survey. Students are confident about their research skills, but their actual skills are lacking. There is a pervasive disconnect that exists in undergraduates self-perceptions of their research abilities vs. their actual abilities.
SANDY Added a new bullet point –digital divide AND Participatory divide
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SANDY 2010: add ISTE standards AND DESE Information and Communication Technology Literacy Course Expectations (GLEs & CLEs) Draft from committee member 2010.
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CAROL Whew - that’s a lot of skills that incoming freshmen need to possess - when should they be acquiring all these skills?
CAROL And this is really just a matter of curiosity, a question for us to all consider collectively. Using your clickers, indicate when formal library instruction ends in your school or school district. Is it taught throughout K-12? Not at all? Does it end at a certain point?
CAROL So back to our question – when should students be acquiring all those information literacy skills that Sandy reviewed? The full answer isn’t a simple one, but it can be answered simply – they should be acquiring these skills continuously . Developing information literacy fluencies is a continuum that extends throughout K-12 and on into college, hence the term “K-16”. Skills and abilities are developed in students over time. The challenging part of the question is - what are the ideal grade levels to learn particular skill sets? When should specific skills be introduced? Reinforced? Mastered? While there are as yet no national recommendations for a K-16 continuum model, several state and regional library organizations are actively exploring this issue. Sandy and I provide links to a number of previously developed K-16 continuum models on our accompanying web guide for this presentation. We’d like to share just one with you for a few minutes, as food for thought/conversation starters. This is a wonderful continuum model developed by Community Libraries Outreach & Collaboration, or CLOC for short. They are an organization of Athens, GA area libraries that have come together to promote and support information literacy. It’s so good that we’ve highlighted it in our web guide with asterisks, and labeled it as a highly recommended link. As you can see, they’ve organized their continuum by the six stages of research, which are color coded. And you can then follow skills for those stages that should be developed, year by year. So for instance, a first grade student will brainstorm for vocabulary. This is further developed in second and third grade. A fourth grader will begin learning to use those keywords to formulate research plans. That continues in fifth and sixth grade, and they begin moving to the next level, to predict results of those research plans, in seventh grade. And so on, until by college they are working with hypotheses and even more refined inquiry techniques. Is any continuum going to be a one-fit solution for all schools? Of course not. This is just one model. Regional schools must come together to determine how they can realistically achieve continuous learning, considering that there is a wide range in the size of school libraries, available services, and regional schools of higher education. But there are enough solid continuum models out there that you can use them as a starting point to support continuous information literacy skill development on a broad basis.
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SANDY– first 5 bullets / CAROL last 2 2010: sandy – add slide with project examples: JUST ADDED BULLET> encourage creative projects Case studies (experiential) You know, I really think this bullet point relates closely to the first one listed on the slide – it ’ s all about putting library instruction in context, in a way that is meaningful for students, in a way that they can grasp the applicability of the skills As Sandy mentioned, that can mean tying skills into current class assignments. But that ’ s not always possible in library instruction. And this is where is where the increasingly popular case study method of instruction comes into play. For example, I ’ m a business librarian. Earch year I lead 45-50 separate “ one shot ” business bibliographic instruction sessions. I could just take students on a tour of various library databases and other resources, but it probably isn ’ t gonna stick because there’s no relevance involved. So what I do is I frame the entire session around a single real-world or theoretical business questions that they might encounter in their future careers, and we explore that question together, using the resources and search techniques I want to introduce to them. I’ve increasingly taken to letting them craft the case study itself. We pick a company, and a country, and then they take the position of being a marketing analyst for that company, working on a project to expand business in that country. They have to figure out what information they need, and then we locate it together. Approaching resources in this way makes business resources – and the information contained in those resources – meaningful to them, in a real-world way. I like to think that they carry those skills with them to their careers after they graduate. Incorporate 2.0 and other emerging multimedia technologies (technical literacy) The web has obviously had a huge impact on librarianship, and technology touches almost all facets of library research today. The ACRL standards that Sandy described earlier identify information technology skills as separate from but highly related to information literacy skills, and of increasing importance as skills required for successful lifelong learning. But as we discussed earlier, students may be avid consumers of information delivered via 2.0 technologies, like blogs, wikis, etc., they ’ ve typically never used them to create and share information. When I teach LIS1600, a university library research skills course, I ask the class to explain what a blog is, what a wiki is, and the vast majority of students don’t know. They’ve heard the terms, certainly, but they don’t know what they are, and have certainly never used them. The only way they are going to gain these skills is if we educators incorporate use of them into class and library research assignments. So Sandy and I both emphasize information technology in our teaching styles, including the creation and sharing of information via blogs, wikis, social networks, web-based presentation and collaborative document applications, like sliderocket and buzzword. Sandy has even used flip video camcorders in an interesting way – would you like to mention that?
CAROL “ The information environment is too complex and is changing too rapidly to expect freshmen to acquire information litearcy without a planned, systematic, and cumulative instructional program. The “ hit-or-miss ” strategy that worked for students and scholars in the past is no longer efficient or effective ” (Hansen & Jackson). So how do we make it happen, together?
CAROL (Explain the graph). So, although we share common concerns, it’s clear that we perceive the state of affairs in infolit land differently. This disconnect means that we need to be connecting more. There is a need for a dialogue between school and academic librarians, to overcome this disconnect in our mutual understanding of student preparedness levels. And the state of student preparedness isn’t anyone’s fault – it’s a collective issue, with collective responsibilities. Academics are quite concerned about IL and spend a great deal of time discussing info lit amongst themselves - forming standards, curricula, assessment tools, etc. But they aren’t speaking to school librarians on a broad basis. And school librarians share the same concerns. But we need to address them jointly. We share the same concerns, s we must strategize together on the best ways to prepare students as they proceed through the educational system and on into the workforce. Collaborative efforts should include public, elementary, middle, high school, and regional academic libraries. One idea is to create interest groups, foster opportunities to dialogue with colleagues, and discuss such topics as info lit and writing and research across the curriculum. And as we do so, we must acknowledge that information literacy is approached differently in K-12 vs. academic. In the K-12 setting, the functions of the library media center are much more integrated into the curriculum than for a college or university library. As a result, info lit instruction has developed much differently in higher ed than in K-12. We need to align and connect these different approaches into a continuum that works for the students. I should point out that the disconnect isn’t just between K-12 and academic librarians. There are similar disconnects between academic faculty and academic librarians. Faculty are often not educated about library services, resources, role, and services, so we can’t expect students to be guided to the library by teaching faculty. But that’s a whole separate presentation! Do you find that school librarians are experiencing the same sort of disconnect with their teachers? Studies show that it is extremely important that school library media specialists fully assume the role of educator, to better facilitate the transfer of library research skills from one grade level to another. Need to become full partners in the total educational program of their institution.
Sandy and I are not standing here in front of you to suggest that we’re spearheading a major nationwide solution to help K-12 and academic librarians communicate with each other better. We are, however, desirous of starting supporting that conversation and we each are doing what we can to facilitate it, including coming here to speak with you. For my part, I recently started a Missouri Librarians that Lunch program. It’s technically an MLA program, but we don’t care if you’re an MLA member or not. Casual lunches have been taking place across the state – there was one recently in Columbia, for example – where all types of librarians can get together to talk about common concerns. Here’s a snapshot from a lunch in my area, attended by both of Warrensburg’s school librarians. We identified lots of ideas for working together. Great things can start with something as simple as lunch. I’m also working to connect with high school students via college students, who are their “near peers”, and someone they’re far more likely to listen to and be interested in than myself. I’m a faculty advisor to an undergraduate student organization on campus that emphasizes educational and service activities. They tutor area middle and high schoolers, and we’re currently coordinating with those schools to organize activities where they go and speak at high school student assemblies about how to succeed in college, and invite middle school students to campus to encourage them to consider college studies. At these events, I get a chance to speak to the kids about the importance of library research skills. It’s not much, but it’s a start. Small things can add up to great things.
SANDY K-12/college collaborations help bridge the gap between high school and college research. What is the nature of that gap? Individual skills may be acquired by a high school student, but they are not easily transferable to new contexts and situations (such as college research), and this is where we encounter the disconnect between what they do know and should know. By collaborating early and introducing students to the academic context while still in high school, we can minimize the disconnect. ---- -------- (above is adapted from Cahoy, 2004): “On the importance of exposing students to academic libraries while they are still in high school: “Individual skills may be acquired, but they are not easily transferable to new situations, which is where we see the disconnection between what students SHOULD know, and what they actually DO know.” “ Like critical thinking skills, IL skills must be taught and practiced in mutiple ways, and in a variety of settings over time.” “Information Literacy in School Libraries: It Takes a Community.” Frances Jacobson Harris, guest columnist., RUSQ.”
SANDY Discuss Ameika (2008) article More models listed at AASL/ACRL Task Force on the Educational Role of Libraries Blueprint for Collaboration: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/whitepapers/acrlaaslblueprint.cfm
SANDY (LIS1600 bullet) THEN CAROL (JCKL activities bullet) 2010: ask Jerry if now more than 7 schools (Belton) 2010: dual credit also now includes regional, independent dual credit courses (distributed) Fairly typical ad hoc approach - not systematic Introduced to reference librarians, situated near them during the day Pleasant Hill, Kingsville, Sherwood, Warrensburg, Archie, Appleton City Added: Dual-credit sections of LIS 1600 And at my library, the James C. Kirkpatrick Library, we have regular arrangements with several school districts around the region. My colleague Jerry Brown manages those programs, and we have high school students visiting the library annually from many different school districts. Recent schools that have visited the campus include (read list). They come to the library and receive an hour of dedicated bibliographic instruction, then a half hour tour and orientation of the library, and are then situated near the reference desk for them to conduct their research for the balance of the day so that we’re situated should they have questions. Those are busy days at the reference desk, but incredibly satisfying ones - we’re meeting our future customers really, and showing them how the library - and librarians - can help them with their information needs.
CAROL While ad hoc arrangements are terrific, and they’re a great place to start - you can have an ad hoc program up and running with just a few email messages or phone calls. But you can also lose an ad hoc program just as easily, if the initiating librarian leaves, for example. If you really want to make lasting change that continually improves, we need to look ahead to more systematic collaboration programs between colleges and K-12 schools, formalized programs that will take more work to put into place, but will reap wider, more permanent benefits. There are many different frameworks for formal or systematic K-16 collaborations. These include: Regional cooperative committees, like CLOC, the regional group in Georgia that put together that wonderful continuum we looked at earlier. One might establish an official role for a college librarian, whose role is dedicated to fostering relationships and collaborative efforts with regional schools. Setting up cooperative borrowing privileges with area high schools is a fantastic way to get students using college resources during their transition years. It also helps for upper-class high school students to have access to academic-level databases that emphasize peer-reviewed journals. --------------------------------- K-12/college collaborations help bridge the gap between high school and college research. What is the nature of that gap? Individual skills may be acquired by a high school student, but they are not easily transferable to new contexts and situations (such as college research), and this is where we encounter the disconnect between what they do know and should know. By collaborating early and introducing students to the academic context while still in high school, we can minimize the disconnect. -------- (above is adapted from Cahoy, 2004): “On the importance of exposing students to academic libraries while they are still in high school: “Individual skills may be acquired, but they are not easily transferable to new situations, which is where we see the disconnection between what students SHOULD know, and what they actually DO know.” “ Like critical thinking skills, IL skills must be taught and practiced in mutiple ways, and in a variety of settings over time.” “Information Literacy in School Libraries: It Takes a Community.” Frances Jacobson Harris, guest columnist., RUSQ.”
CAROL On our presentation webguide, we have a link to the Association of College & Research Libraries’ and AASL’s joint Blueprint for Collaboration site. This is a terrific resource for those interesting in developing college transition programs. They list many programs in place around the country, and I selected just two representative models to share with you. OSWEGO: The State University of NY in Oswego has a formalized relationship where a designated librarian attends all school district administrative meetings. This is the college librarian liaison model. While it seems like a political arrangement vs. one that directly involves students, the rewards gained from regular, systematic communication is fourfold. As issues are discussed, the college and school librarians can collectively discuss how they will impact information literacy instruction at all levels. IRVINE: The University of California Irvine Libraries recently received a sizeable grant to establish a two-year pilot program that will lay the groundwork for long-term collaboration between the university’s libraries and target Orange County high schools. This program, known as the SPIRIT Program objectives are to develop partnerships to teach life-long learning skills to high school students and to help increase the number of students that meet and exceed UCI admissions requirements. It’s good for everyone. These are just two examples of how K-12 and college libraries are collaborating to support a systematic approach information literacy education at all grade levels. There are many others worth exploring on the Blueprint for Collaboration site.
CAROL So how do we go about starting this all-important dialogue? Who reaches out first to whom? It can work in both directions. Let’s consider first how we - college librarians and educators - can reach out to K-12 librarians and educators. First, we can pick up the phone to try to grow ad hoc programs. As we’ve seen, they’re easy to establish, and are often the catalyst for more formalized programs. So we can contact regional school districts to market and promote high school research visits to college libraries, we can work to expand dual credit programs with a strong research component, like the LIS1600 course that Sandy teaches. We can also work to change students preconceptions about the library, and then build on those early, positive experiences: at the Kirkpatrick Library, we’ve been trying to woo students with totally non-academic events like a Murder at the Library event for incoming freshmen – it’s been so popular that we’ve done it two nights in a row. We also sponsored a Game Night and are currently planning a Dance Rave at the library for the fall. Some libraries have even arranged miniature golf events at the library. These events have nothing to do with info lit, and yet have everything to do with making students feel comfortable at the library and interacting with librarians.
SANDY Added info about Endowment : Apply for the money
SANDY (discussion time, generate more ideas for working together)
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CAROL And that concludes our presentation - we’re happy to entertain any additional questions or comments you might have. And remember that if you’d like to explore the topics we’ve covered today, including critical freshmen skills, info lit standards, continuum models, collaboration examples, etc., we’ve put together a web site for you. Here’s the link. You can also link to it from the MASL conference web site, and we have a card with the website url on it for you to take with you. Please take extras, if you’d like to share the site with colleagues. Just leave your clickers by the door on your way out – thanks!