Information Literacy @ Purdue

The world is a messy place! That’s one of Nancy Pelaez’s major messages for her students. Pelaez, an Associate Professor of Biology at Purdue, participated in the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT) course redesign initiative, where she  redesigned the foundational course Biology 131 (Biology II: Development, Structure, and Function of Organisms) with the goal of getting her students to think more like scientists. Rather than giving them the answers, Pelaez asked her students to explore different sources of information– to share and compare possible answers.

Taught in the spring of 2012 for the first time, students in BIOL 131 attended a lecture once a week, then worked in small groups online to solve problems, which they then shared and discussed with the rest of the class. Some of the problem set questions required students  to find fresh, relevant information to further inform what they  were learning about in the lecture and by reading the textbook. In their small group discussions, the students discussed what they found and collaborated to come up with the best possible answers.  The problems were scaffolded, beginning the first week with finding images or videos on the Internet to help understand a concept, to later examining experiments to understand what kind of evidence biologists use to solve problems. BIOL 131 students learned how to navigate the Purdue library databases, define scholarly primary research, and distinguish primary research from meta-analysis–all while learning more about the course content. During the second half of the semester, the students applied what they had learned to create their own academic posters.

Pelaez and her peer mentor assistants have been amazed at the differences they have seen. The quality of the exams and essays have improved from previous semesters and the strongest student work displays a maturity of thought many would not expect from first-year students. The students are actively engaged in making sense of the “messy world” of biological information!

Those who attend or work at a university will often joke about the differences between the subcultures and epistemological approaches associated with their school’s many colleges and majors.  Science students, for example, sometimes joke about liberal arts students being flakey or ambiguous in their thinking; liberal arts students may joke about science students being rigid or narrow in their thinking. But, how different are students from major to major really? Recently, a group of professors and undergraduates here at Purdue began examining some of the differences between students of two majors that may appear quite similar in subject and approach to outsiders: Engineering and Technologist students. From their first endeavors into researching these students, they are finding that students of Engineering and Technology seem to take markedly different approaches to information literacy and problem-solving.

Their project is called “Innovation Differentiation: Examining the Problem-Solving Approaches of Engineering and Technologist Students.”  The team consists of Dr. Michael Fosmire (Associate Professor of Library Science), Dr. Todd Kelley (Assistant Professor of Technology, Leadership, and Innovation), Dr. Senay Purzer (Assistant Professor of Engineering Education), Nathan Moody (undergraduate in Technology, Leadership, and Innovation), and Kayla Fouch (undergraduate in Biology). This group endeavored to determine if Engineering students and Technology students approach the design process in different ways: whether they use different problem solving strategies, and whether they use their time differently. The team took four students—two from Engineering and two from Technology—and gave them a sample project to work on while the team observed them and their work. The team videotaped the students as they worked, took screen captures of what they typed on computers, and analyzed the drawings they produced. Having collected this information, they attempted to characterize the differences between them, asking such key questions as:

• “How did the students try to define the problem in front of them?”
• “How did they try to brainstorm a solution?”
• “How did they try to model a solution?”; and
• “How did they try to determine  the successfulness of their solution?”

The team found that, even though Engineering and Technologist students may appear similar in terms of the type of work they are doing, the students they observed ended up approaching that work very differently. They found that Technology students searched for more information to inform their working with the problem. Instead of making assumptions about the problem and what resources were available to them, they tried gathering data from external sources to figure out what they could work with. By contrast, the Engineering students worked more from the knowledge base they already possessed and conducted less research into the problem.

As the team characterized it, the Technology students were more “problem focused,” while the Engineering students were more “solution focused.” The Technology students focused on figuring out what the problem was, then figuring out a solution based on that. The Engineering students, on the other hand, made a number of assumptions at the beginning of the design process about, for example, what kinds of resources and budget was available, and they did not try to determine who the stakeholders were; instead they worked based on their intuitive grasp of their subject matter to get an idea of what the possibilities might be for their design. While Technology students tried to figure out what has worked best in the past in similar situations in order to adapt those situations to their current project, the Engineering students were more likely to try to develop models and develop their designs from scratch.

The speculation at this point is that these kinds of decisions may reflect the methods and focuses of their different majors. Technologists consider themselves a kind of applied engineering, while Engineers consider themselves more of an “Engineering science” with an approach that is more abstract in nature. To arrive at clearer answers, the team studying these questions will conduct further investigations into these new areas of thinking about Engineering and Technologist approaches to the design process.

2011 Soy Division Winners (Product: Non-zinc Denture Adhesive)

When people think Soybeans and Corn, they usually do not think cosmetics, computer circuit boards, helmet pads, or nanomolecular car polish. But these are exactly what some of the most recent top contestants in the Soybean and Corn Competition thought—and they stood to win as much as $20,000 for their entries. At the beginning of every fall semester, the Soybean Board and Corn Board send the callout for the competition, and challenge students to develop ideas for new products made out of soybeans or corn. Students from many different colleges at Purdue enter, but those who will be most successful soon realize they need strong information literacy approaches to compete.

Amongst the competition’s many requirements, students must submit patent search reports and marketing reports. But these innovating Purdue undergraduates are not left to struggle through the patent and marketing databases alone—a formidable task, considering that most students’ may never otherwise need to investigate one or the other set of databases for their majors. Charlotte Erdmann, Associate Professor of Library Science, and Mary Dugan, Assistant Professor of Library Science, aid students as they work their way through these challenges.

Early on in the competition, students have to determine whether their idea has already been created and patented. Erdmann assists students in working with the patent search databases available through Purdue Libraries’ Guide to Patent Resources on the Web and in the Engineering Library and PubWest, a special group of databases from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Students must submit information about whether patents already exist for the product they are seeking to create or even if there are patents on products which are similar to their innovations. Many students do not begin with an idea of what other products have already been patented and have no idea of how to go about finding this information. For some, Intellectual  Property is a nebulous concept at best. Erdmann not only helps students understand how to acquire this information but also aids them in figuring out how to understand it.

When students arrive at the marketing phase, they can then turn to Dugan. Students must find marketing information to write up a report, and they must also develop a marketing plan for their product. However, most students who enter do not come from the School of Management and are not sure what to do with the marketing. Dugan helps students learn how to look for information in the marketing databases on products that might be similar to their own or even the same product but made with materials other than soybeans or corn. They gather information about these other products, determining what companies sell them, how well they sell, and what kinds of people tend to buy them. They then synthesize the information for a marketing report.

Although students do stand to gain an impressive monetary prize from this competition, they inevitably gain a lot more. What they learn about information literacy through the competition will certainly help them produce more excellent entries, but it also prepares them for the kinds of work they will no doubt be doing when they leave Purdue and begin working with products for the companies that will employ them.

Catherine Fraser Riehle, an instruction and liaison librarian here at Purdue, faced a challenge in the first-year Honors Seminar she co-taught. This challenge was one that instructors in all disciplines find too common today: how to lead students beyond easy, “Google-based” research strategies into deeper and more critical research approaches.

Riehle, of course, is well aware of the unique challenges and opportunities that the information age poses for students today, and her original instructional plan seemed entirely reasonable. She would have her students develop criteria for assessing the quality of science-related websites, present them with pre-selected websites of varying credibility levels to evaluate, conduct class discussions based on their conclusions, and fill in whatever knowledge gaps remained by guiding them through established criteria for information evaluation.

But not only did she find her students were painfully bored by this process, the content she endeavored to teach them did not transfer to their research papers: their bibliographies reflected the typical first year reliance on the easiest, at-hand sources (e.g., top Google hits) in spite of the quality (or lack thereof).

For some instructors, this situation can feel so frustrating it seems hopeless. But Riehle attended the Teacher Track of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Immersion program and what she learned there changed her entire approach. The program encouraged its attendees to move away  from the traditional pedagogical models with their focus on experts imparting knowledge to passive students. Rather than these ossified approaches, ACRL instead presented constructivist theories, calling for instructors to become facilitators for students’ construction and personalization of meaning.

That next year Riehle returned to her seminar eager to apply this new approach. She began by having her students read articles from Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column online at The Guardian. In a popular format, Ben Goldacre performs the kind of evaluation Riehle wanted from her students. His writing was a jumping-off-point for learning about information evaluation, allowing students the opportunity to see good information literacy in action in a “real-world,” accessible format. Riehle asked her students to respond to Goldacre’s articles and reflect on how they handle information in light of what they had seen the Guardian writer say and do.

The “Bad Science” postings would lead to discussions about the scientific publication cycle: Riehle would then have students engage with the University of North Carolina’s Biology Research Tutorial visualizations which presented them with a view into the academic publishing world with consideration for sources ranging from peer-reviewed articles to popular forms of media like Facebook and Twitter. Engaging with information literacy from such a practical and personally identifiable dimension for these future professionals illuminated for them the full extent of the publication cycle’s role in real-world science and knowledge and what role different sources can viably play in that cycle.

Finally the students learned how information can be used well and poorly, ethically and unethically, through an engagement with Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics; here students could see how the already existing knowledge they were working with was also a product of similar kinds of constructive approaches they had been using in the course.

The results Riehle saw in students research papers and reflections seemed clear. Students’ research had clearly improved over the course of the year. Furthermore, students could identify the changes in themselves, remarking in reflective blog entries just how much their approaches to and understanding of the information they were working with had changed.