Posts Tagged ‘improving student research skills’
October 17 - For Better Research Assignments, Ask a Librarian
By: Beth Schuck in Instructional Design
A recent survey of faculty handouts for research assignments found that most of the handouts provided details for length, citation guide style and how to get assistance from the faculty member. What wasn’t included was a critical need for most undergraduate students: context for the research topic.
June 29 - Alternative Writing Assignments: The Integrated Paper
By: Genevieve Pinto Zipp in Teaching and Learning
As faculty working with students to explore topics of interests we frequently request that they review the literature to gain an understanding of what is known and unknown about a topic and then present their findings in an integrated manner. While many students are familiar with developing papers termed “literature reviews” or “reviews of the literature,” these types of papers frequently do not afford the students the opportunity to integrate what has been found. Thus faculty have begun to require that students present their findings and thoughts via what is known as an “integrated paper format.”
January 17 - The Lost Art of Note Taking When Writing a Research Paper
By: Matt Birkenhauer in Teaching and Learning
When students write essays requiring research, in the age of Wikipedia and other online resources, I worry a little, not so much about the quality of the sources themselves (that has always varied, even in the day of hardcopy sources), but about the quality or outright dearth of note taking that often accompanies the writing of research papers.
January 11 - Student Writing: Avoiding the Blank Screen Blues
By: Kari Benson, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
Staring at a blank screen the night before the research paper was due—this was the dilemma faced by my upper-level science students. The paper, the product of their independent research projects, is an important part of our curriculum and one component of our assessment of their scientific writing skills.
May 26 - Wikipedia in the Classroom: Tips for Effective Use
By: John Orlando, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies, Teaching with Technology
Most academics consider Wikipedia the enemy and so forbid their students from using Wikipedia for research. But here’s a secret that they don’t want you to know—we all use Wikipedia, including those academics.
September 17 - Providing Feedback in a Technology-Mediated Environment
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
This seminar will give you valuable insights and techniques for using technology to communicate concise feedback to students about their writing, encourage them to take responsibility for their growth as writers, and strengthen teacher-student rapport to better support and facilitate learning.
May 5 - Partnering with Your Librarian to Promote Information Literacy
By: Marilyn Steinberg and Kari Mofford in Effective Teaching Strategies
Librarians as partners is a relationship that may not have occurred to you, but as librarians we think it’s one you ought to explore. Librarians are qualified to help you with pedagogical issues that go way beyond how to find a book or search a database.
April 20 - Are You Encouraging Plagiarism? Six Tips for Improving Your Term-Paper Assignments
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Take the plethora of information available online, add the ease of which students can cut-and-paste material, throw in lots of pressure to get good grades, and plagiarism becomes an appealing option to almost any student.
February 23 - Information Literacy: Improving Student Research Skills in a Wikipedia World
By: Mary Bart in Curriculum Development, Effective Teaching Strategies, Teaching and Learning
When you assign your students to write a paper, do they know where to start? Upperclassmen surely do, but what about freshmen? Left to their own devices, they’ll likely turn to Google and Wikipedia as their main research tools, and may never even set foot in the library if they can help it.
February 19 - Faculty and Librarians as Partners: Collaborations That Work
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
If information literacy isn’t part of the vernacular at your school, it will be soon. As the volume and variety of information available to students continues to explode, students need to know how to locate, evaluate, and use the information properly and ethically. Your school’s library staff can help.
Kari Nyren Mofford is the co-chair of the New England Library Instruction Group and previously was instruction coordinator/information technology librarian at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. She has presented at conferences on faculty-librarian collaborations and creating information literacy programs with librarians.
