Information Literacy in English 102

The First Year (also my first year)

In Fall 2004 the new program was implemented into English 102.  This was also my first year at Dominican (and my first year out of library school).  My colleague, Mary Pat Fallon, and I taught the 4 sections between ourselves in the fall.  In the Spring we had 11 sections and were assisted by 3 other librarians.  I created a document to guide the other librarians whose primary duties did not include instruction. 

Eng102 Session objectives ref2-1.doc

There was an assessment piece included this first year.  We used the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial and the 3 associated quizzes to assess student learning.  It was not terrribly useful. 

Assessment

Year 2

Annotated Bibliography Pilot Year

5 sections in the fall of 2005, 12 in the spring of 2006. 

Involved faculty were pleased with the results of the assignment and unanimously voted to proceed for Spring. 

Faculty and Librarians were pleased with the quality of sources (a dramatic improvement) and satisfied with the annotations (the most problematic part of the assignment).

The time involved in grading the assignments was considerable, however, all involved felt it worthwhile. 

Some kinks were ironed out in the spring and long term partnerships have developed over the past two/three years. 

Anecdotally the students view the librarian as "their librarian" and tend to follow up with that person beyond the English 102 class.  Some have brought friends along to insist that that librarian will help them too. 

Year 3

394 students completed the Information Literacy Foundation Requirement through English 102. 

120 students registered for the alternate workshop and, of those, 97 completed the workshop and the assignment. 

More Stats:

Total Library staff presentations to groups/classes    204

Tours and one-time presentations    131

Hands-on instruction for using electronic databases    169

Hands-on instruction for Internet searching    169

Year 4 (Current Year)

Some problems remain - deadlines, communication, expectations, time, cheating, etc.

Consistently maintaining data about the assessment - statistics? electronic copies?

Follow through and loopholes? - what is the repercussion is the student doesn't complete the assignment?  Fail the IL component? How do they make it up? The Transfer student factor. 

Incorporating social technologies for completing the assignment? We have been exploring the use of a wiki for the annotated bibliography but have not yet determined a course of action nor fully explored this possibility. 

Using and teaching RefWorks for citation managing?  Complicated to teach, takes up more class time, does it add to or detract from the primary mission of IL?