Instruction: March Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

Promoting Student Literacy in Library Instruction

Last week as part of Northeastern Illinois University’s Learn & Lead Symposium, I attended a session on supporting and promoting student learning from college-level texts by Professors Kristi Madda, JoAnne Vazzano, and Janet Pariza from NEIU’s Department of Literacy Education. At the outset, we looked at some of the reasons students may be struggling with completing the readings professors assign them in classes. They outlined several barriers students encounter that may prevent them from completing their readings, ranging from the physical, i.e. reading difficulties or not having the required text, to the emotional, i.e. lack of motivation or understanding the value of completing the readings. If students are struggling with completing their readings - for any of the reasons above - it’s likely they also would be struggling with research.

Although Madda, Vazzano, and Pariza were focused on the example of professors teaching students in a classroom, and centered their discussion on assigned readings in textbooks, librarians also can build literacy in library instruction - and not “information literacy,” but straight-up literacy skills: how to read a text, understand it, and determine its relevance to you. In library instruction sessions and individual consultations with students, I find myself teaching students how to read to recognize what research is applicable to their own and build up their motivation to read through dozens of research articles to find what will be most useful to them.

First, the texts involved in research may differ dramatically from what students are used to reading. Abstracts to scholarly articles, let alone the articles themselves, can be overwhelming to students who may be accustomed to reading (or simply skimming) textbooks. The jargon varies based on discipline, but professors will often encourage students to find empirical articles, or research articles, or studies - without stressing how students will need to actually read abstracts or entire articles to identify them. Students will look for the keywords that match their topic, missing relevant research described differently, or look for the phrase “empirical research” in the abstract, without looking for cues such as methodology or findings. To stress the importance of reading in library research, in library instruction for Sociology, for example, as I demonstrate the features of Sociological Abstracts, I read through several different search results to provide examples of the different kinds of articles a student may encounter in the database - including an empirical study, a literature review, a theoretical piece, or newsletter or blog post - highlighting the different keywords in an abstract that indicate what kind of article we are looking at. Pointing out the different kinds of articles in a database also allows me to show how not everything in the database is equivalent in relevance, usefulness, and purpose - an empirical article has a different value for a student conducting research than a literature review. This exercise highlights relevant vocabulary for students and demonstrates the different kinds of materials they may see in the database, even though it all looks the same in the web interface. Simply put, I show them how to read what they are going to find in a database. This modeling behavior shows students how to preview the texts they may encounter in doing research, and quickly to assess how it will help them in their research.

So, I’ve shown students how to “read” database abstracts. What next? How do I convince them that library research relevant and useful to them? To motivate students to engage further with the texts, Madda, Vazzano, and Pariza encouraged professors to build anticipation for and make new connections with texts through open-ended discussion, quick writing assignments, and using videos, images, or other media. The same applies to library instruction. When I first started doing library instruction, I would jump into instruction on subject-specific databases first, but I found during the practice time at the end of class most students would revert to using the database with which they were most familiar (usually Academic Search Premier, which was the default database on the NEIU library homepage). When I skipped the first step of making the material I would cover immediately relatable to the students, they retained much less about what I was trying to teach them. Now, depending on the level of the class, I start with the databases and/or resources with which students are already familiar, then demonstrate how they are related to different library materials. I start with popular, familiar sources such as Google and YouTube, then challenge students to think about how those sources are different from the scholarly sources in the library and their classes. If a student was confined to researching using just Google, how much would she find? What would be missing? By focusing on the faults of sources they already use, students see a clear reason to try to use a source that may be more challenging at first, but more effective in the long run. This technique builds on students’ previous knowledge of internet searching to include specialized searching for specialized sources - and after this activity, rarely has a student said he’d rather search Google instead of a specialized database!

As an instruction librarian, I feel I’ve been well-schooled in the importance of encouraging information literacy. However, the value of stressing regular, plain-old literacy can’t be overlooked. When students understand how to read the different kind of research they may come across, and understand the value of that library research, it opens them up to learning about other kinds of information and sources. Starting at the beginning, and supporting these initial literacy skills, will make it easier for students to accept everything else we have to show them!

Michelle Guittar
Social Sciences Librarian
Northeastern Illinois University