Course Development Grant Descriptions

Information Literacy in Art History 255 Eighteenth Century European Art and Architecture Alden Gordon

This course is regularly offered and fulfills a requirement for Art History majors and a broad distribution requirement in the arts for the general student population. The course has a focus on "Sublime, Picturesque and Romantic" philosophical notions as reflected in art and landscape architecture. The goal of the course is to explore the relationship between ideas (philosophical, religious, literary and poetic) as they are reflected in French, English, Italian and German culture in the eighteenth century.

As part of this course, all students pursue a research project based upon original works of art. This helps students become literate in using two different types of sources ­ one visual and others which are written. Students must select a work of art to examine, become conversant with the original object and its physical techniques, imagery and character, visually analyze the style, develop a bibliography, outline the term paper and then write the essay.

For the Fall semester 2003, students chose their objects -- in this case illustrated books -- from  Trinity College's Watkinson Rare Book Library. The goal was to have students investigate the catalog of the Watkinson and consult the original works. Once they discovered their chosen book, they created digital images of the appropriate engravings to facilitate further research. Students used bibliographic software to assist in the development of a comprehensive bibliography on their topic. From this bibliography, they placed interlibrary loan requests as required.

This project resulted in a public exhibition of the book illustrations that students had chosen as their research objects from the special collections of Trinity's Watkinson Library. (A poster from the event and brochure are also available.)  Students produced the labels in the display cases based on the papers they had written and demonstrated both their visual literacy and presentation skills.

Chemical Literacy Course Development for Chemistry 312L Instrumental Analysis David Henderson

This is a Junior or Senior level course taught every year and required of all Chemistry majors. The course has traditionally been a place where students encounter chemical literature and has always made at least some effort to teach students how to use Chemical Abstracts. However, this has never been done in a formal manner and no assessment of student success has been made. Furthermore, in parts of the course, students were given reference lists rather than asked to construct such lists. A major part of the course is group projects, which take the entire semester to plan and complete, and which uses about 25% of the total lab time. These projects require that students locate, read, synthesize, and apply material from the chemical literature.

Several aspects of the course were chosen for integration and assessment of information literacy skills.

1. Journal Clubs Converted to a Group Project

The Chemical Literacy Group Project consists of library activities in which students are to find the most recent developments in each of five areas of instrumentation being covered in the course. This activity replaces a "Journal Club" activity in which students typically just grabbed the first article they could find or in some cases were given a list of "important" articles to prevent their bringing in trivial material for the discussion.

By setting this activity as a competitive game with a premium on finding current and promising techniques, students are forced to not only search the literature but to evaluate it and make judgments. The details of the game are provided on the student handout. Suffice it to say that each student has incentives to find an interesting topic and to convince her fellow students that she has found the best article and technique. This is enforced by having students "vote" at the end of class by investing some of their resources in the techniques they feel are most promising.

In addition to finding the key article, students must also develop a short annotated bibliography, identify prominent researchers in the field, and find background information on the corporation developing the product with the eye to buying the rights or the company. This provides some familiarity with the current companies making analytical instruments and extends students search capabilities into business databases.

The only modification of the game that was necessary for the second time the class was taught was adjustments in scoring. These were required due to the fact that the number of students presenting and attending each session varied. The investments were therefore normalized for both factors so that these factors were nullified in the final evaluation.

2. Project Lab

 This component has always involved a literature search component, but it is not always clear that all students do the search or learn the skills. This activity was modified so that each student does an annotated bibliography of articles relevant to the analytical problem.

Students are divided so that each is doing research on a different aspect of the problem. Then all of their work will be collected for the use of their group in the next phase of the project.

3. STNEasy Tutorial

To ensure the above activities are possible, specific instruction and exercises on the use of STNEasy and other library resources are needed. A Power Point presentation on searching through STNEasy, ACS Journal Archive, and the Business Resource Center was prepared and used in the class. This presentation was prepared with the expectation that it would also be made available for use by students in Chem 208 and other courses. To this end, a narration was recorded to accompany most slides which students can access as they watch the presentation. Furthermore, notes were provided on most pages as well. This presentation is, therefore, a stand alone product. Because the Trinity Library web interface was changed after this presentation was prepared, it was recently revised with new screen shots where necessary to reflect the present interface.

4. Assessment

An initial and final assessment tool was also developed using material from Kenyon College as a starting point. The initial assessment was administered to the class prior to any Literacy instruction. The use of paper surveys to evaluate student literacy before and after the class was less successful that hoped. The time required to collate and code the results into a useful format was daunting. Therefore, two closely related Blackboard Surveys were developed which took the salient questions from the paper survey and converted them to an electronic instrument which allows rapid assessment using the tools available in Blackboard.

In past years, journal sessions have been relatively unexciting and students often put little effort into their work. The Literacy Group Project led to a much higher level of student interest and produced very satisfying interactions.

The other faculty who teach the course have been involved in discussion of the game and are committed to continuing its use. The initial and final surveys are also available for next years class.

Information Literacy in EDUC 300 Education Reform - Past and Present Jack Dougherty

This mid-level core course typically enrolls about 20 sophomores and juniors each spring. It is required for all Educational Studies majors and also attracts additional students through cross-listing with the American Studies and Public Policy programs.

This is the best-positioned course in which to improve student learning in the Educational Studies core sequence. By strengthening information literacy in Educ 300, students will acquire a set of complex skills at the most appropriate time in their major curriculum, when they have moved beyond the introductory Educ 200 course and can master more advanced academic tasks, which they will continue to use during their remaining one to two years at Trinity.

Educ 300 is a multi-purpose course. At one level, it offers students a comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary school reform movements, from Henry Barnard's local efforts to establish common schools in the mid-1800s to President George W. Bush's drive for federal accountability in the "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001. On another level, the syllabus teaches students how to closely read primary and secondary source materials, and how to think like historians and policy analysts. Finally, the course introduces students to the guidelines for proposing, investigating, writing, and evaluating research papers in upper-level Educational Studies courses, particularly the capstone senior research seminar. By infusing information literacy skills into the heart of the mid-level Educ 300 course, we can greatly influence how students do academic research through to the completion of their senior year projects.

Support from the course development grant helped to augment and refine earlier, loosely-connected efforts to integrate bibliographic instruction into the syllabus through a variety of means:

 a) Articulated the information literacy standards more clearly by revising portions of the Educ 300 syllabus and the steps behind the major research paper assignment. While several similarities already exist, refining the language of my course materials to match the standards creates a "seamless" process, especially for Trinity students who have already been exposed to the standards in previous courses (such as First-Year Seminars). Specifically, I rewrote some of my syllabus objectives to fit standard 3A, and redesigned my "Research Proposal Guide" and "Final Paper Guideline" handouts to fit standards 1-5.

b) Collaborated with a librarian to create a revised Upper Level Research Guide for Educational Studies. This guide is more specific to this course and other upper level Educational Studies courses than the general Research Guide for Educational Studies.

c) Designed information literacy learning activities to replace a "scavenger hunt". In my experience, students do not make the best use of library resources (such as archives, microfilm, periodicals, videos, electronic databases, and books) until they have had some meaningful hands-on experience in locating and using them for academic purposes. Originally, I presented a wide range of these library resources to students while covering the historical survey portion of the course, during the first seven weeks of the syllabus. But students had no idea where these archival documents, books, videos, and websites have come from, nor where to find similar resources for their own research in future weeks. Therefore, I added some small-team, out-of-classroom activities to the syllabus for the first half of the Educ 300. Students were assigned to identify specific resources in the syllabus, then supplement my lectures by explaining how to find them in the Library and Information Technology Center, and adding any comments about the broader context of the resource (beyond the specific pages or images that we were studying in class that day). This was a more effective way to introduce library resources while extending the learning for the day's topic, in comparison to the scavenger hunt, which did not make this connection.

Information Literacy in ENGR 232L Engineering Materials: John Mertens

ENGR 232L is a core engineering course required of all engineering majors and usually taken during the sophomore year. The course is offered every spring term, and has a laboratory component.

Besides the study of Engineering Materials, ENGR 232L has a number of basic goals for general instruction of engineering majors as a result of it being a sophomore-level core course. These goals include learning how to write an engineering laboratory report; basic instruction on probability and statistics; and basic instruction on uncertainty analysis. This is often the first engineering laboratory course our majors take, and it is the first step to becoming a literate engineer.

One laboratory meeting was devoted to information literacy instruction. Goals of the information literacy instruction included (but were not limited to) educating students as to the different kinds of scientific information and sources of information that exist; where and how to find these sources; how to bring themselves up to speed on a scientific topic starting from zero; how to progress beyond a general scientific literature search to perform a true scholarly literature search; how to evaluate and use web based information; and how to remain information literate in the future as technology changes.

Assignments were developed that required each student to go through the above processes for an engineering materials topic unique to each student. Special care was taken to select topics that are still subjects of scientific investigation and research, but are not beyond the level of comprehension of the students. This ensured that student investigations yielded results in current popular, general, and scholarly literature, requiring them to discriminate between them.

Students were instructed in the lab in a hands-on environment, with every student sitting in front of a networked computer, the instructor using a projection screen computer, and two or three library staff personnel in the room. Students were given handouts that were both general in nature, and specifically developed to lead them through the Trinity College database setups. They evaluated a range of scholarly and popular materials. I believe that the exercises performed by the students were structured such that the students learned that they must be aware that database systems are constantly changing and they must be able to adapt and figure out how to use them on their own.

Information Literacy in ENGL 344 Representing the Old World and the New Chloe Wheatley

"Representing the Old World and the New,"  was an upper-level course in which I focused on moving students from close textual analysis of a literary text into more independent critical and contextual research.

In terms of content, "Representing the Old World and the New" includes works ­ literary as well as historical ­ that illuminate crucial aspects of early modern European travel, trade, and colonial exploitation. The course focuses on how writers of fiction like More, Shakespeare, Behn, and Milton, as well as writers of "true histories" such as Hakluyt, Purchas, Harriot, Raleigh, and Smith, absorbed and contributed to the profound transformation brought on by early modern mercantilism, conquest, and colonial settlement.

In terms of course objectives and the assignments designed to achieve these aims, I focused on creating reading and writing assignments that would replicate for students a process I see as crucial to the writing of a thesis: the oscillation between close careful reading of literary texts and consideration of relevant critical and cultural contexts. The course was writing-intensive, and one of my very accomplished seniors (who had taken a version of the course in fall 2002) sat in on the class and served as a writing mentor.

All of the literary texts in this course are greatly enriched by consideration of the historical/colonial contexts in which they were produced. However, plunging too quickly into questions raised by the scholarly authorities can be overwhelming for students, and can inhibit the development of more original and personally felt connections to a given work. Therefore, I structured the reading of the course so that we began with careful and close analysis of a very select number of literary texts. After a brief introduction to Renaissance conceptions of travel, we devoted the first half of the semester to close analysis of our primary literary texts and their themes, rhetorical strategies, and generic types. Students wrote a series of short essays on these literary texts, and a midterm tested their thorough knowledge of them.

Then after a few weeks we moved on to consideration of related cultural contexts, treating assigned literary works as a subset of a more broadly defined set of "colonial writings." Students read from an anthology of travel and colonial non-fiction that I had assigned and also began research on a chosen cultural context related to the course reading. Their research was impelled by questions that they had formulated in the process of their initial close readings. This was a very successful component of the course, I believe, because students were in effect put in charge of determining the direction of the course. It also served as an opportunity for students to practice using print and online library resources.

Finally, we devoted the last third of the semester to assessment of available critical texts related to Renaissance travel writing. Students read both assigned scholarly articles and presentation papers produced by their peers as they practiced reading, digesting, and evaluating the significance of various cultural and critical documents. In this way, students gained experience integrating critical and primary sources with their own initial observations about the assigned literary texts. As they completed a series of written critical evaluations and then a longer final essay that integrated local literary analysis with the research that they had conducted over the course of the semester, they in effect became participants within a broader critical conversation about the nature and significance of early modern colonial writing.

When I sat down to discuss with students what they found useful and what they would change in the course, they were quite clear that they appreciated the opportunity that the course gave them not only to become familiar with the rich resources of Trinity's library, but also to have a say in the shape of the course content. They were most invested in the assignments that enabled them to excavate specific contextual information, and suggested that in the future that these presentation papers be made an even more central component of the course. Students were also not very enthusiastic about the critical articles that I had assigned, and in fact in the course of their research found resources directed at a general readership that they found even more useful given their initial ignorance of the period. For example, two students located acclaimed popular histories on Jamestown that I am considering putting on the syllabus next time I teach the course. Students overwhelmingly agreed that the course could be even more narrowly focused around the colonial writings associated with the Americas. Students were most engaged by these writings and felt that we could have explored them in even more detail. I agree with them, and feel that although the trend in contemporary scholarship is to define early modern writings more "globally," for the purposes of this particular course a more narrow focus would enable research projects to be at once more varied and more obviously related to each other. Such a focus would also allow me to emphasize more fine-tuned distinctions between different types of literary and historical documents.

Overall, I was encouraged by the nature of their evaluations of the course. I feel that the course as designed proved a good start at familiarizing students with the information literacies associated with the serious study of literature; the fact that they had such strong opinions about the content of the course suggests to me that students indeed began to feel like masters of their subject matter and by implication of the research methods emphasized in the course.

Integrating Information Literacy Instruction into Math 101 Contemporary Applications: Math for the 21st Century Cathleen Zucco-Teveloff

This course is taken by freshman, sophomores and transfer students who failed to demonstrate proficiency in the quantitative literacy areas of numerical relationships, statistical relationships, algebraic relationships and logical relationships. This course is offered every semester.

Eight application web-based modules were developed. These modules are available through Blackboard for individual use and group use by students. Each module consists of an introduction, detailed background information with links to appropriate official web sites, 10 to 15 exercises linked to appropriate official web sites and a short 4 to 5 question self assessment quiz on the background information and the exercises. The names of the eight modules are as follows:

Module 1: Percentages and Proportions in Nature
Module 2: From Generation to Generation: Price Comparisons and Rates of Inflation using the Consumer Price Index
Module 3: MegaCities and Descriptive Statistics
Module 4: The Gallup Poll and Probability
Module 5: Energy Availability and the Average Rate of Change
Module 6: Metro City Taxi Fares and Linear Functions
Module 7: Growth of Developing Nations and Exponential Functions
Module 8: Decay of Radioactive Materials and Exponential Functions

Students are required to find and to read the topical background information, analyze the data critically and apply their findings to problem resolution. For example, in Module 5, using official web sites such as the Energy Information Administration of the United States Department of Energy, students will have to gather information about: the advantages and disadvantages of using different energy resources such as oil, natural gas and electricity, the ramifications of using these energy resources on the environment and on national security, the data describing the current availability, the prices and the usage of these different energy sources, the predictions for average use of these energy resources during the next decade and the feasibility of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

Students are formally assessed on quizzes and exams where the questions would ensure they comprehended and completed each module. In addition, each module provides students with an informal opportunity to evaluate their progress. This informal mechanism is a short self-assessment quiz available in Blackboard.

Information Literacy in PBPL 201 Introduction to American Public Policy Renny Fulco

This course introduces students to the formal and informal processes through which American public policy is made.  They study the constitutional institutions of government and the distinct role each branch of the national government plays in the policy-making process, and also examine the ways in which informal institutions – political parties, the media, and political lobbyists – contribute to and shape the policy process.  Information literacy workshops and their ensuing assignments require students to evaluate the myriad of information sources dealing with American public policies.

Information Literacy in PSYC 295 Child Development Dina Anselmi

Child Development, Psychology 295, studies the biological, cognitive, and social factors that influence the process of development. The course focuses on both theoretical and empirical issues in child development and includes topics such as attachment, language, condition, and socialization. The course highlights how cultural factors, especially for children growing up in urban environments, influence both the manner and the end result of the developmental process. The optional laboratory introduces students to the major scientific methods of observation, interviews, and experimentation that are used to study important developmental questions in the areas of language, memory and concept development, sex-role stereotyping, pro-social development and play. This course includes a community learning component and a major research project.