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Trinity College CTW Mellon Grant for Information Literacy In the third year of the CTW Mellon Grant for Information Literacy, grant supported activities at Trinity College included the continuation of information literacy projects and programs developed during the previous two years as well as new initiatives focused on discipline-specific information literacy skills and the ethical and legal use of information. We have also continued to share the experiences and results of our information literacy activities within the CTW consortium and at professional meetings. As in the previous two years, the grant has allowed us to hire temporary staff for Library and IT support, giving regular staff the opportunity to plan and conduct the information literacy projects. Other expenses covered by the grant included faculty stipends, project-related costs, and professional development pertaining to information literacy. A report of expenditures is attached. We have much appreciated the support from the grant that has helped us to focus on information literacy development in ways not feasible without this additional funding. Course Development Grants In fall 2004, three of the eight courses that had been developed to integrate information literacy components with funding from the grant were taught for the first time:
First Year Information Literacy Instruction The comprehensive outreach to students in their first semester has been the cornerstone of Trinity's information literacy program. In fall 2004, 1681 students participated in a total of 98 instruction sessions connected with their First Year Seminars. To better assess the development of students' information literacy skills, a pre- and post test has been developed (see attached) that is given prior to their first instruction session and again at the end of the semester. The test was developed as part of ACRL's online course on student assessment and was requested by ACRL to be archived as an example of an appropriate assessment. Last fall, the pre- and post test was taken by 155 First Year Seminar students. Students' mean score of 69% on the pre-test rose to 78.5% on the post-test. The test is now part of the information literacy program for all incoming students. Based on the success of the First Year information literacy instruction, the newly expanded First Year Program asked the Library to develop a semester-long half credit course on Research Methodologies and Information Resources . This course is offered to upper-level students planning to become research associates for one of the First Year cluster seminars that span over a full academic year. Taught for the first time in spring 2005 to a group of 10 students, the course culminated in a public presentation on Mentoring First Year Students in Information Literacy (invitation attached). Several faculty members and administrators attended the presentation and were impressed by the range of skills the students had acquired. Discipline Specific Information Literacy In spring 2004, Trinity's grant implementation team together with the Music & Performing Arts Librarian hosted a lunch for faculty in the Music and the Theater & Dance departments to discuss information literacy objectives for performing arts students (see attached discussion paper). Our goal was to introduce more faculty members to the concepts of information literacy within the specific context of their disciplines. Of the four faculty members attending, three have already incorporated information literacy components into their teaching and/or have requested instruction sessions for their classes. In response to feedback from her students, the faculty member teaching the Child Development course (see above) initiated discussion among the members of the Psychology department about the information literacy skills for psychology majors. The goal is to map a progression of information literacy skills into the sequence of required psychology courses. The discussion is based on a document titled Connections between the APA Undergraduate Psychology Learning Goals and Outcomes and the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education available at http://www.lawrence.edu/fast/revieg/acminfolit/apa.html . In spring 2005, there have been two well attended meetings of psychology faculty with librarians and IT staff which laid the groundwork for further collaboration. Online Citation Tutorial In December 2004, Trinity's grant implementation team accepted a proposal by a recent library school graduate to develop an interactive online citation tutorial Cite It: How to Document Information based on research she had done on existing plagiarism tutorials. Rather than focusing on the legal implications of plagiarism, the goal of the tutorial is to help students understand and practice the ethical and legal use of information. Examples are given for the citation of information resources in a variety of formats, including text, images, sound, data, etc. in each of the four citation styles most commonly used in the humanities (MLA and Chicago), social sciences (APA) and sciences (ACS). All content plus story board had been developed by the end of this summer and has been submitted to a graphic designer. The anticipated completion date is December 2005. The tutorial is expected to be used both as teaching tool and reference source and fills a need repeatedly articulated by faculty. Information Sharing Trinity College has continued to contribute results of its information literacy activities to the online database of Learning Activities, Learning Objectives (LOLA), developed by Wesleyan University as part of their grant funded projects. This year, we have submitted to LOLA the information literacy pre- and post test as well as a classroom activity written for the grant supported course on Education Reform. In March 2005, a librarian and an IT staff member from Trinity College joined a colleague from Connecticut College in a presentation on Developing Tools and Practices for Information Literacy Instruction given at the NERCOMP special interest group meeting on IT/Library Collaborations in Teaching and Learning (see attached program). The presentation was well received and resulted in several inquiries for further information about our information literacy programs. The collaboration between Trinity's librarians and IT staff on the course specific information literacy projects has been one of the most rewarding experiences over the last three years. To give all who participated in one of the project teams a chance to report and reflect on their work, the grant implementation team organized a one-day retreat early this summer (see attached program). In our discussions, we confirmed our commitment to further collaboration and exchanged views on our evolving roles for faculty and students. Outlook This third year of the CTW Mellon Grant for Information Literacy was expected to be the final year of the projects and programs supported by the grant. We are grateful for the extension of the grant by one more year that will allow us to bring a couple of our projects to completion. This fourth year will also be an opportunity to review the various components of Trinity's information literacy program and to recommend a sustainable model for its continuation. The review will involve further dialogue and information sharing with Trinity faculty, among the three CTW schools and within a larger information literacy network.
In the second year of the CTW Mellon Grant for Information Literacy, the focus of information literacy activities at Trinity College has been on supporting the courses that had been awarded grant funding for integrating the development of information literacy skills into classroom teaching and assignments. Two of the courses were conducted in fall 2003, and three in spring 2004. An additional three courses were prepared during summer 2004 and will be offered this fall. Each of the courses was assigned a support team consisting of at least one librarian and academic computing specialist along with one of the three members of Trinity’s implementation team for the Mellon Grant. A list of the courses that received grant support is attached. More detailed descriptions of the information literacy projects conducted in these courses including assignments and outcomes will be made available on Trinity’s website for information literacy at http://www.trincoll.edu/prog/infolit. One the most important results of the course development projects has been the intense collaboration between the faculty and their information literacy support teams. Faculty openly discussed their course objectives and assignments with librarians and academic computing staff, and in turn learned about information literacy approaches in library instruction sessions, the use of the new citation software RefWorks, and applications in Trinity’s course management software Blackboard. Most of the in-class information literacy instruction was team-taught and the faculties’ consistent endorsement of the need to develop sound research habits reinforced the specific strategies presented by the librarian or academic computing specialist. Students were generally attentive because it was clear to them that they were expected to apply their information literacy skills in specific assignments that were part of their course grade. In the summary reports, one faculty noted “a significant improvement in student research proposals and final papers” (EDUC300), another reported on feedback from a student “that she had ‘already used that stuff’ on a research project” (ENGR232L), and a third confirmed that the course “proved a good start at familiarizing students with the information literacies associated with the serious study of literature” (ENGL344). The Art History course (AH255) resulted in a public exhibit of the book illustrations that students had chosen as their research objects from the special collections of Trinity’s Watkinson Library. Students produced the labels in the display cases based on the papers they had written and demonstrated both their visual literacy and presentation skills. (See attached flyer). The Chemistry course (CHEM312) developed the most imaginative assignment in the form of a Chemical Literacy Game that will continue to be used every year in a course required of all Chemistry majors. (See attached assignment) Because well-structured engaging assignments are crucial for practicing information literacy skills, Trinity College’s grant implementation team organized and hosted a workshop on April 23, 2004 on Developing Information Literacy Skills: Assignments that Work. We invited faculty, librarians and IT staff from all three CTW institutions and presented a program showcasing two grant-funded courses that had creatively integrated information literacy assignments into the course content. We also invited a panel of a faculty member, a librarian and a writing center staff to address how the ethical use of information can be fostered through thoughtful assignments. The workshop generated lively discussion among the participants who appreciated the opportunity to reflect on improving the quality of student work by considering new approaches to assignments. The schedule of the workshop is attached and the discussion summary has been posted on Trinity’s information literacy website. In yet another effort to share information literacy assignments, a group of mentors from the First Year Seminars has begun to collect assignments that have been developed for First Year Seminars. The assignments that had been gathered by the end of spring were then transcribed with the help of a librarian and a library school intern and entered into LOLA (Learning Objects, Learning Activities), the interactive database developed by Wesleyan’s library and computing staff as part of the Mellon grant. This repository of assignments has already been demonstrated at the First Year Instructors’ meeting and will serve as a valuable resource for all involved in First Year information literacy instruction. At Trinity College,
the outreach to First Year Seminar that had been in the center of our
grant supported activities last year has expanded from 91 instruction
sessions in fall of 2002 to 108 instruction sessions in fall of 2003.
Eighty-five percent of the First Year students last fall completed an
anonymous assessment of their instruction sessions. The survey asked
for brief comments on the value of the instruction session leading to
the following results: Our goals for
the third and last year of the Mellon grant include a focus on the assessment
of information literacy skills, support for two new group projects on
information literacy in the performing arts and the social sciences,
completion of the remaining course-based information literacy projects,
continued development of the First Year information literacy program,
and participation in a CTW information literacy summit to share the
results from our grant-funded information literacy projects. In the first year of the CTW Mellon Grant for Information Literacy, Trinity College Library and Academic Computing staff laid the foundation for an ambitious, multi-faceted program of information literacy education at Trinity College. The program was developed by Trinity’s implementation team for the grant in collaboration and consultation with several academic programs and departments. The regular contact with colleagues from Connecticut College and Wesleyan University, particularly in the initial stages of planning and publicity about the grant, has provided an invaluable framework to review and shape Trinity’s plans. Their scale and implementation would not have been possible without the financial support for hiring temporary staff and the project incentives for faculty and participating staff. The following report summarizes the accomplishments during the first year of the grant and outlines the projects that are under development. For a financial report about 2002/03 expenses against the Mellon Grant for Information Literacy, see the attached print-out from Trinity’s business office. At the core of Trinity’s program for information literacy is a comprehensive outreach to all First Year Seminars. In close collaboration with the Director of the First Year Program and the faculty of First Year Seminars, Guided Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Arts and Science programs, librarians developed a sequence of 3 introductory sessions to be offered in all courses for First Year students. The sessions consist of an introduction to the library and its catalog, taught by the First Year Seminar mentor together with the librarian assigned to the class; an introduction to databases, tailored to an assignment co-written by the teaching faculty and the seminar librarian; and an introduction to finding and using internet resources provided either through an online tutorial, assignments in Blackboard, or in-class instruction. In the fall of 2002, nine Trinity librarians were assigned to work with all of the 44 First Year Seminars and First Year special program courses. By the end of November they had conducted 91 instruction sessions providing 90 percent of the incoming class of 2006 with a basic understanding of academic library resources and information retrieval skills. The focus during the spring of 2003 has been on developing a model for the definition and support of discipline-specific information literacy skills expected of majors. In order to facilitate communication with faculty about the five standards of information literacy, a team of librarians and academic computing staff wrote a condensed version of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, ACRL, 2002 (see attached). We then mapped the five standards into a grid and developed a questionnaire for faculty to help us define departmental expectations for information literacy skills (see attached). The model was reviewed and piloted with the Chemistry Department and the results have been posted on Trinity’s information literacy web page (see below). We also began to develop discipline–specific online research guides which are accessible from the Trinity College Library home page and have already become a valuable instruction tool. During the course of the grant, we plan to work with at least one department in each discipline group on defining the information literacy expectations for their majors. Also, work on the research guides will continue with the goal to cover all disciplines and programs taught at Trinity College.
To promote knowledge about information
literacy and the CTW Mellon Grant, the CTW Consortium hosted a one-day
conference in November 2002 for faculty and administrators from all
three institutions that was attended by 16 participants from Trinity.
Many more had expressed an interest but were not able to attend. To
give more faculty members at Trinity a chance to learn about the concepts
of information literacy and the CTW Mellon Grant implementation plans,
Trinity’s implementation team invited all Trinity faculty members
to a presentation in early April. The collaboration with colleagues in the CTW consortium continued during the spring with a focus on creating a shared database for all consortial information literacy projects. As we compared our work with faculty in the various discipline groups, we identified similarities among our projects that call for the collaborative creation of modules. Also, three librarians from the CTW Consortium participated in ACRL’s Immersion 03. They each worked on information literacy plans for their individual campus, but also read and commented on the plans of all members in their group. The focus at Trinity for the next year
will be on the development, implementation, and assessment of the course-specific
projects; the expansion of the research guides; and the continued definition
of upper-level information literacy skills. We also plan to emphasize
presentations and information sharing about the grant-sponsored information
literacy projects, both formally and informally, on the Trinity campus,
online and within the CTW consortium.
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