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Instruction Session Topics
First, how should you select a topic for your session? It is important to have a clear understanding of your students’ abilities as researchers. Are your students familiar with library databases?
Or, do you suspect that they may not even know where the library is? Once you have determined this, consider the primary objective; what do you hope your students will gain through the
instruction session? If a majority of your students are new to the academic research process, we recommend that you start with the following session:
- Beginning Academic Research: Our introductory library session designed to help students become familiar with a variety of library resources and services.
Many new and first-year students are overwhelmed by the research process—particularly if they have not received prior library instruction. This session will encourage students to create
a search strategy by helping them understand where to begin their research and where to look for more specific information once they have defined a manageable research topic. The session will cover reference resources and a variety of other print and electronic resources, all searchable through the Library’s catalog and online databases. Students will explore the correlation between search terms and search results. In addition to providing a foundation for conducting research in the academic environment, this session will introduce concepts from more advanced instruction sessions.
If your students are knowledgeable about general resources and basic search techniques, we can guide them to more subject-specific resources:
- Advanced Academic Research: Building upon the concepts addressed in our Beginning Academic Research session, more advanced sessions are tailored to fit the research needs of upper-level courses in any department. Librarians will help your students locate information in a variety of subject-specific resources as these have been known to stump even skilled researchers.
Beyond the basics, we offer sessions that help students develop other critically important information literacy skills. These skills will impact the manner in which they interact with information as students and as general consumers. Ultimately, this will benefit students in transition between academia and the professional workforce.
- Evaluating Resources: Students have plenty of options when it comes to locating information. Often, students do not realize that ‘web’ resources can include library resources. This session will enable students to evaluate information based on criteria such as authorship, publication date, and publication type. Students will be asked to explore information on the library website as well as information from a variety of popular non-library websites.
- Scholarly vs. Popular: Similar to Evaluating Resources; this session will delve further into the topic of evaluating information by exploring the relationship between scholarly research and popular media. Emphasis will be on popular magazines (Time, Newsweek, etc.) versus scholarly journals as a means to convey intellectual discovery.
- Recognizing Bias and Point of View: This session will help students learn to recognize bias in information. Students will be encouraged to explore resources which represent a variety of subtle and more noticeable biases and points of view to discover the impact that each has on the representation of information.
- Locating Primary and Secondary Resources: Frequently, college students have little or no experience researching primary and secondary resources. In fact, many students do not recognize the difference between these kinds of resources and therefore struggle to find the information that they need. This session will help students distinguish between primary and secondary sources; librarians will demonstrate effective search strategies to help students locate appropriate information in your subject area.
- Citing Sources and Using RefWorks: Does your class involve an extensive research component? If so, this session could help save your students valuable time in citing sources. RefWorks is a web-based bibliography and citation manager that enables users to format citations in a variety of citation styles. RefWorks also helps users manage citations, generate bibliographies, and even cite sources while typing papers in Microsoft Word.
Have questions? Are there other library or research related topics not included
here that you would like your students to learn about? Let us know!
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