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A First-year Engineering Information Literacy Workshop to Increase Student Awareness of Research Databases

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Information Literacy in First-year Courses and Co-curricular Experiences

Tagged Division

Engineering Libraries

Page Count

22

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34002

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34002

Download Count

450

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Paper Authors

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Evie Cordell Northeastern University

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Evie Cordell is the First Year Experience and Undergraduate Engagement Librarian at Northeastern University. She is the liaison to the Writing Program, General Studies Program, Explore Program, ContiNUe Program, NUi.n. and several other First Year Programs at Northeastern University. She also serves on the First Pages (Northeastern University's common reads program) committee and is a member of the FUNL (First Generation, Undocumented, Low-Income) Network at Northeastern.

Evie holds a Bachelors degree in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a Masters of Science in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Alissa P. Link Cilfone Northeastern University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-1736-329X

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Alissa Link Cilfone is the Head of STEM and Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University. She also serves as liaison to the biology and bioengineering departments in addition to leading an interdisciplinary systematic reviews team. Previously, she worked as a STEM Librarian at Northeastern University and an Education Librarian at Boston University’s Medical Campus.

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Susan F. Freeman Northeastern University

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Susan Freeman, is a member of Northeastern University’s first-year engineering facutly, a group of teaching faculty expressly devoted to the first-year Engineering Program at Northeastern University. The focus of this team is on providing a consistent, comprehensive, and constructive educational experience that endorses the student-centered, professional and practice-oriented mission of Northeastern University. Susan Freeman has moved into the Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education role, and continues as a teaching professor in the first-year program along with many new responsibilities.

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Richard Whalen Northeastern University

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Dr. Richard Whalen is a Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in Boston, MA and is Director of First-year Engineering. The mission of the First-year Engineering team is to provide a reliable, wide-ranging, and constructive educational experience that endorses the student-centered and professionally-oriented mission of the University. He also teaches specialty courses in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern and has published and presented papers on approaches and techniques in engineering education. He has won multiple Outstanding Teaching Awards at Northeastern and numerous Best Paper and Best Presentation Awards with fellow First-year faculty coauthors at ASEE.

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Brooke Davis Williams Northeastern University

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Brooke Williams is the Research & Instruction Librarian at Northeastern University serving as liaison to the Khoury College of Computer Science, the departments of English literature, communication studies and theatre, the School of Journalism and the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Before joining the team at Northeastern, she worked as the Resident Librarian for Information Literacy Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brooke has bachelor's degrees in English literature and American studies from Skidmore College and a Master of Arts in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Abstract

The goal of the library’s First Year Engineering Workshop series is to introduce new engineering students to key research resources at the start of their degree programs. The workshops were created in partnership with the First Year Experience and Undergraduate Engagement Librarian, STEM Librarian, Engineering Librarian, and the First Year Engineering Program.

With the introduction of a First Year Experience Librarian, the library saw increased capacity for instruction to first year programs. After outreach to the First Year Engineering (FYE) program, a collaboration was initiated to create a workshop building a foundation of information literacy skills for new engineering students. The workshops were offered in conjunction with an assigned research project to reach students at their point of need. Thirteen outside of class workshops were offered during the Fall 2018 semester, with required attendance for students of three FYE faculty members. Content of the workshops covered: navigating the physical and electronic space of the library, finding engineering research through engineering specific and science databases, and a brief introduction to citation managers. After the first round of workshops, FYE faculty received positive feedback about the library workshops from students. Students found that having the workshops scheduled around the start of a research project, in which they had to develop an informative presentation centered around a topic of interest related to their design team projects, was invaluable. Faculty noticed the quality of the research and presentations was notably improved over previous semesters when the workshops were unavailable. Faculty who attended the workshops themselves found the content to be a valuable addition to the curriculum. Based on this observation and feedback, the FYE Program elected to continue the workshops in Spring 2019 and further expand them for future academic years. In Spring 2019, the collaboration expanded to include students of four additional professors with a total of 329 students attending the workshops by the end of the 2018-2019 academic year. In addition to program expansion, librarians also noted a 27.33% increase in the number of searches done in a database included in the workshop during the first year of the program (2018-2019) from the previous academic year (2017-2018). Database usage from Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 will be assessed as it becomes available.

In the 2019-2020 academic year, the workshop added a new graded assignment and was opened to all eleven professors in the FYE program. Outside of class workshops and in-class instruction sessions were offered by a team of Research & Instruction librarians for all incoming 801 FYE students. Assessment questions added this year will be reviewed and discussed in the paper. Other outcomes to be reviewed will be the quality of research conducted by first year students assessed by their instructors. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and content of the workshop and how it was integrated into the FYE program. In addition, the paper will outline future changes to the workshops including managing scalability and incorporating new librarians.

Cordell, E., & Link Cilfone, A. P., & Freeman, S. F., & Whalen, R., & Williams, B. D. (2020, June), A First-year Engineering Information Literacy Workshop to Increase Student Awareness of Research Databases Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34002

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015