Library User Education

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Tips for Effective Library Research Assignments

Librarians and faculty want to help students learn. Librarians' want to help students develop information literate thinking processes and faculty seek to indoctrinate them into disciplinary norms. For both groups, this includes cultivating students' research abilities. By collaborating with librarians in developing assignments, we can ensure that students learn how to find the most appropriate information and use it properly.

Check with a librarian to ensure that the libraries can support the assignment's requirements.

• Ask a librarian to provide instruction sessions for your class. We can tailor it to the needs of the assignment to cover search strategies, resource selection, and more.
• Most students have never learned how to perform college-level research and will do better if taught how by reference librarians, the specialists who are here to help them learn these skills.
• Schedule instruction session/s at least two weeks before you would like to meet. Library instruction works best if students already have started the assignment. If research techniques aren't applied immediately then they will be forgotten before they are useful.
• Include specific, written instructions for the assignment and give expectations for learning objectives
• Explain what's expected from research in your discipline, including citation style.
• Define terms that may be unfamiliar such as annotated bibliography, primary sources, or peer - reviewed.
• Undergraduates, particularly first & second years, are very literal. Don't just tell them to use the library ; let them know that you expect them to ask reference librarians for help.
• Give suggestions for particular sources only after checking the citation and the item's availability.
• Offer general suggestions for resources, but don't be too proscriptive. It is more effective to limit sources to scholarly journals than to limit searches to particular titles.
• Explain clearly if you don't want students to rely solely on what is freely available on the Internet. When students are told, "don't use the web," they think that includes subscription databases too.
• Let students know that the research/writing process requires steady, incremental progress ; that gathering information needs to be done in stages. Each stage requires narrowing the scope of the search and discovering what else they need to know in order to respond to their research question.
• Monitor student progress throughout the semester through meetings, evaluated assignments, or a research journal to encourage reflection and prevent academic dishonesty.
• Try completing the assignment yourself, to determine how difficult and time - consuming it is.
• "Scavenger hunt" assignments make the library seem unnecessarily difficult to students. If you would like students to learn particular resources or the services offered by the Central University Libraries, consider consulting with a librarian about how to introduce students to us in positive way.
• Evaluate sources included in the bibliography, and grade it based on the quality, appropriateness, and selection. Librarians are happy to help with this.

 

Call or e-mail for a consultation or to or to set up an instruction session:

Library User Education Request
luerequest@smu.edu

Rebecca Graff
Central University Libraries
User Education & Outreach Librarian
regraff@smu.edu
214.768.3656