Workshop I

(Friday, October 6, 2:15-3:30 pm)

Preparing Students for Research

This workshop explores opportunities for enhancing student learning by incorporating information-seeking and critical-thinking skills into class assignments using scholarly resources. Bring your syllabi for group discussions on easy ways to include scholarly research and critical thinking into assignments and projects. Experienced librarians will highlight resources that provide extra value to assignments and student research. The goal of this workshop is to help instructors and others working with students in classroom and research settings to strengthen their information-seeking and critical-thinking skills.

Presenters:

Beth Thomsett-Scott, Vanessa Eyer, Angela Davis

Penn State University Librarians

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Workshop II

(Friday, October 6, 3:45-5:00 pm)

Effective Peer Evaluation of Teamwork 

Effective teamwork is an important aspect of value creation in many organizations; appropriately, organizations are looking for potential employees who can work well in a team from the start. This has created the need to introduce activities to build collaboration and teamwork skills in many college curricula. Peer evaluation is one of the best ways to assess the group dynamics of a team project. However, there are a few tools available for facilitating peer evaluations and efficiently compiling information designed to assess one team member compared to the team as a whole. This workshop will first introduce alternative methods for peer evaluations and then demonstrate the Peer Evaluation & Assessment Resource (PEAR), which is a web-based solution that was created to efficiently assess the teamwork skills of students through peer and self-evaluations. The PEAR tool allows instructors to form teams from their student rosters and choose a rubric to assess their teamwork skills, abilities, and contributions. Student peer evaluations have several problems such as very high peer and self-ratings inconsistent with students’ expected skill levels. The workshop will also introduce methods to address some of the pitfalls in peer evaluations.

Presenter:

Dr. Abdullah Konak, Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State Berks

Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)