Teaching information literacy and evidence-based practice in an undergraduate speech-language pathology program: A student reflection

Purpose: This study assessed teaching information literacy and evidence-based practice skills using an active-learning library workshop in an under- graduate speech-language pathology capstone course. Method: Students’ responses regarding teaching in- formation literacy skills and evidence-based practice using a workshop, which was collaboratively de- signed and taught by a health sciences librarian and a speech-language pathology faculty member, were measured using the one-minute paper (OMP; Angelo & Cross, 1993). Fifty-one OMPs were collected over a 2-year period. Students were asked 2 questions on the OMP: “What information did you learn today that you think will be most useful to you in your speech- language pathology and audiology course work?” and “What question(s) do you still have?” Student reflections were analyzed using qualitative methods. Results: Responses to the first question revealed 6 themes that students found helpful; the most common concept was search strategies. Student feedback on the second question generated 10 themes. The most common theme was not having any questions. Students asked about evidence appraisal and why the material was not introduced earlier. Conclusion: The benefits of a librarian and faculty member collaboratively teaching undergraduate students information literacy skills for finding evidence- based information are highlighted. Results indicate that students learned effective strategies for finding evidence-based information and support integrating information literacy into the speech-language pathology curriculum early and often

Bringing in the Experts: Library Research Guide Usability Testing in a Computer Science Class

Objective – We sought to develop best practices for creating online research guides in an academic library.Methods – We performed usability tests of particular library research guides in order to determine how to improve them. Students in a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) class (n=20) participated in the studies both as subjects of the tests and as evaluators of the results. The students were each interviewed and then asked to review the interviews recorded of four other classmates. Based on their own experience with the guides and their viewing of their classmates using the guides, the students worked with librarians to develop best practices.Results – Students were generally unfamiliar with the library\u27s research guides prior to the study. They identified bibliographic databases as the most important links on the guides and felt that these should be prominently placed. Opinions about many specific features (e.g., images, length of guide, annotations) varied widely, but students felt strongly that there should be some organizational consistency among the guides.Conclusions – The importance that students placed on consistency led the library to adopt guidelines dictating the inclusion of a table of contents and short list of major databases at the top of each guide, as well as uniform placement of certain other elements