Projects

Instruction librarians strive for improvement and conduct research to this end. The following projects demonstrate the variety of our interests.

Current Projects

NCHEA : Project on First-Year Student Success
The goal of this project is to gather committed teams of faculty, student affairs professionals, academic advisors and student to create a series of working groups aimed at improving our programs and services for first-year students. Librarians are an integral part of this project.

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Field Study
In partnership with the Educational Testing Service, the CSU is working to develop a problem-based information literacy assessment tool that can be used in a variety of higher education settings. Because information literacy can be difficulty to assess, this tool could be invaluable as campuses begin to want to measure students' and graduates' information literacy skills on a campus-wide basis. During the summer of 2004, CSUSM will be participating in a beta-test of this tool. For more information see: http://www.calstate.edu/LS/infocomm.shtml

Sociology Information Tutorial
This tutorial introduces students to information research strategies and concepts, search skills and techniques and information resources in the field of sociological studies. It is aimed at helping students successfully accomplish class assignments from sociology classes and other social science classes. It will prepare sociology students to work effectively in an information intensive society by increasing information awareness, access, evaluation and utilization ability. The tutorial is available at CSUSM WebCT site and updated each semester.

 

Completed Projects

Measuring Minds Grant
This multi-pronged assessment project was aimed to measure progress of the first class of students that have been at CSUSM for the full 4 years. By reviewing assignments and syllabi of their General Education courses, conducting focus groups to gather attitudes and comments from graduating seniors, and by a multi-prong skills test of their research abilities, we gathered data that helped guide the Information Literacy Program.

Getting Published
This web site guides students through the process of researching a topic culminating in a research paper that the students ultimately “publish” in one of the mock electronic journals. Students are required to abstract their articles and input descriptors forming the index to the various journals. Students thus become published authors and experienced indexers.

Information Competence: a Workshop Series for High Schools .
With funding from the CSU Information Competence Initiative this project developed and implemented a series of forums for the North San Diego County High Schools that prepare students to attend our institutions. Participants in these forums included teams of administrators, teachers and librarians from our feeder schools. These forums presented the concepts of Information Competence, initiated a dialogue between our feeder schools and ourselves, and presented expectations of student information skills and research behavior from the University and Community College perspective.

Information Competence as a Student Learning Outcome
(College of Business Administration) A project of the College of Business Administration whereby in collaboration with the Business librarian, a series of college meetings and workshops were held to discuss information literacy and to incorporate the Standards for Information Literacy Competency into the learning outcomes for our students. The meetings and workshops had as their primary goal to develop an understanding of information literacy and of the Standards, to plan a systematic review of the curriculum with the focus of incorporating the Standards, and to test and assess the implementation of the Standards into the curriculum in an appropriate manner.

Psychology Department Information Competence
“A major in psychology at CSUSM provides a strong emphasis on empirical, scientific, investigation.  Students are exposed to a broad range of perspectives, problems, methodologies, and bodies of knowledge that exist in psychology today. Information competence is integrated across our courses, and students are required to find, evaluate, use, and communicate information in many of their courses.” This website include the various learning outcomes, sample syllabi and assignments.

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes, a grant
This grant, written by the Association of College and Research Libraries, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and managed by 3 CSUSM librarians, supported the training of academic librarians working with faculty to design, implement and evaluate tools for assessing student-learning outcomes.  The grant activity was divided into 3 phases during which time we provided meetings at conferences and a Web-based forum for training and reporting.  The selected teams consisted of librarians and faculty working collaboratively to develop assessment tools and criteria to measure student learning within an information literacy setting using the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.