Monthly Archives: April 2019

Digital Badges

Badges Pave the way for more Advanced Instruction

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The Library Learning Services Digital Badges Team has used the Instruction Reboot time to critically examine our information literacy badges program, its role in foundational library instruction, and the efficacy of badges as a mode of teaching our students. We are not the only Penn State librarians working with digital badges, though. Colleagues in our subject libraries and at Penn State campuses around the state have implemented them in a variety of ways. Carmen Cole, Information Sciences and Business Librarian, shares here the ways digital badges have enriched her instruction for both resident and online IST students:

“In the 2018/2019 academic year, I piloted the use of our digital badges in IST 110: Information, People and Technology. My collaborator in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) was Dr. Christopher Gamrat (Chris), an expert in digital badging systems. Chris’s dissertation, completed at Penn State in 2017 through the Learning, Design, and Technology program, is entitled Digital Badging Systems as a Set of Cultural Tools for Personalized Professional Development. As an Instructional Designer in the College of IST, Chris also teaches for credit, both residentially and through World Campus.

To best suit the introductory-level curriculum of the IST 110 course, we chose the following badges for students to complete: Academic Integrity, Lionsearch: Getting Started, and APA Style Citations. In Fall 2018, for Chris’s residential IST 110S course, students completed the badges before attending the Libraries’ Open House. The intent was to expose students to the physical and virtual library during what was, for most enrolled in the fall seminar section, their first semester at Penn State. Integrated into the IST 110S curriculum is a series of talks given by visitors, including the liaison librarian. I am tasked with speaking about “academic integrity and library resources.” Although I have a set lesson plan for these sessions, assigning the badges prior to my visit allowed me to conduct more advanced instruction. The students were much better prepared to discuss academic integrity when presented with a series of scenarios tailored to IST. Also, Chris and I were able to create a paraphrase and citation activity based upon the skills students learned from the badges.

The students enrolled in Chris’s Spring 2019 World Campus IST 110 course were also required to complete the badges. I did not have the opportunity to perform instruction after assessing the Spring 2019 badges, but reading and commenting upon their open-ended responses was a good way for me to get to know World Campus students and make them more aware of my role in IST. In particular, there was a large military presence in the World Campus section, including students currently on active duty. Some of their responses to the open-ended questions, especially in the Academic Integrity badge, were strongly related to their service, something that helped me learn more about their unique circumstances and needs.

To gather general impressions of the badges and their effectiveness from the students, Chris and I modified an informal survey instrument provided to us by Dr. Victoria Raish (Torrie). Overwhelmingly, students in both sections considered the APA Style Citations badge to be the most useful and the Academic Integrity badge to be the least useful. The majority of students agreed that the badges influenced their work in IST 110 and other classes, and supported the use of the badges in future IST 110 classes. Assessing the badges allowed me to “know what I didn’t know” and engage more fully with each student when responding to their open-ended responses, something I never would have had time to do during a 50-minute, one-shot session. Also, it was interesting that many students, without being prompted to do so in the badges, connected their answers to the course content. I am fortunate to have an enthusiastic collaborator in the College of IST, and, with the support of Library Learning Services, aim to integrate the badges into additional IST 110 courses in the future.”

Many thanks to Carmen for sharing her experiences! 

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Foundational Learners Team Update

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As the Foundational Learners Team approaches the learning experience of our students, we are focusing on the learning environments we currently create. We are exploring how we can adjust them  to be more learner centered, more knowledge centered, and more assessment centered, three concepts from the 2000 book, How People Learn, which Library Learning Services is currently reading as a unit.

 (chart from page 134)

In short, learner centered environments are those that pay attention to the prior knowledge, attitudes, and culture students bring with them to the educational setting (133), knowledge centered environments focus on the way students become knowledgeable (136) and assessment centered environments foster opportunities for feedback and revision (140). As you might guess, ideal learning environments contain all three.

One of our core projects this semester addresses learner centered environments: we are doing a series of focus groups with ENGL 15 students. In these focus groups, taking place later this week, we will investigate the most ideal learning atmospheres for students, as well as their attitudes and approaches to research. Through the knowledge gained in these encounters, we will make recommendations as to when and how library sessions should take place. It will also give LLS a general idea of where students are at educationally, culturally, etc, so we meet them where they are.

Knowledge centered environments are often guided by learning outcomes, and we are surveying the librarians in LLS, to see what learning outcomes they are teaching the most often, which will then guide our discussion of foundational instruction when our groups reconvene in May.

To address assessment centered environments, we are working on three projects. The first is mapping our learning outcomes to our student and faculty evaluations, making it easier to tailor assessment to what has been taught in class. The second project is a assessment guide, giving librarians ideas for formative and summative assessment which can be done in the classroom. Finally, more broadly we are looking at the Instruction Steering Committee’s document Evaluating Library Instruction Partnerships in General Education Courses as a rubric to approach both future and current partnerships.

The Foundational Learners group hopes to leave the Instruction Reboot with new ideas about the state of our learners, the best ways to share our content, and techniques that will lead us to assess our teaching and our programs. We’re well on our way!

National Research Council 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853.

Distinctive Populations

Distinctive Populations Team Update

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The Distinctive Populations team has begun delving into research on several key student populations on campus. We have collected a variety of institutional data on these populations, and begun benchmarking with other institutions by exploring the published research related to the role of the library in supporting these students groups.

Because student veterans are a priority for both the university and the Libraries, we have identified veterans as a target population for our reboot work. According to a January 2019 article in Penn State News, Penn State has joined 30 other higher education institutions in a commitment to graduating more military veterans as a part of the American Talent Initiative (ATI). Penn State has also begun planning a new 6,300-square-foot Student Veteran Center on the University Park campus. In the Libraries, creating welcoming spaces for veterans is a recommendation in the STEM Visioning 2018 report, a document that outlines plans’ to “explore opportunities to collaborate and shape forward-looking services” within STEM libraries.

Through our research into student veterans at Penn State, we discovered that first-year undergraduates with veteran status may enroll in a Veteran’s First Year seminar course, and are eligible for a special living option that helps them transition to college with others sharing a similar experience. Our reboot team is exploring ways to connect the Libraries with these programs for student veterans.

Our team has also identified other potential partners for future collaboration, including the Comprehensive Studies Program hosted by the Multicultural Resource Center (MRC) and the Equity Scholars Program. Both these programs help students who are Pennsylvania residents and who may be first-generation college goers successfully navigate the college experience.

Our next steps are to begin conversations with key partners within the groups we’ve identified and to develop ideas for what our involvement with the programs will look like, with the goal of piloting a workshop or other form of engagement with at least one program in Fall 2019.

Many thanks to team members Megan, Hailley, Anne and Amy for all their work so far.