Purpose -This case study, created by a Faculty Learning Community on Research Fluency, investigated students' information literacy practices at Miami University, including information search process, preparation, differences in students' information literacy skill levels, and how well they transfer these skills outside coursework.Design -Faculty and librarians designed a survey of about 60 questions, which were given to 300 students in faculty's classes by librarian FLC members.Findings -FLC members discovered where perceptions among professors, librarians, and students were similar, and where they differed.Practical implications -Influenced by the findings, participating faculty made changes to the course plans and included additional assignments to make the process of research more explicit.Originality/value -While there are similar studies about information literacy, the Miami University study is distinct in that it reports on collaboration with faculty and makes use of their perceptions of students.
This paper outlines the case studies of two librarians who work closely with graduate students in fine arts programs. Realizing that graduate students can often experience a unique form of research anxiety, both librarians collaborated with faculty to embed themselves into the research methods courses of their programs. Both librarians found that the chance to work one-on-one with graduate students resulted in a reduction of their anxiety, an increase in information literacy skills, and a strengthened partnership between the librarians and the departments.
Reading Harper Lee: Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman by Claudia Durst Johnson is meant to assist students studying the work of Harper Lee by providing context for her life and work and examining key topics such as race, class, and gender. It functions in some ways as an update to Johnson’s Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents (Greenwood, 1994) since it includes analysis of Go Set A Watchman. Rather than being a replacement for the 1994 reference work, it functions as a great complement for a student studying Harper Lee. While Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird provides numerous primary documents to help a student understand the historical context, Reading Harper Lee provides a more concise analysis of themes, which potentially makes it more accessible to a student new to literary criticism.
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