Student Research Skills: Introduction

Can you and your departmental colleagues answer these questions?

1. Has your department defined student learning outcomes for the research process (finding, evaluating, and using information)?  If so, how and where are the learning outcomes integrated into the curriculum?
2. How will students demonstrate that they have learned these outcomes?
3. How will you determine if students are learning these outcomes? And if they don’t appear to be, how will you make changes, or “close the feedback loop”?
4. What will the librarian’s role be in facilitating these outcomes?

Eleven departments can answer these questions, because they have participated in EWU Libraries’ Student Research Skills, an on-going initiative since AY 2007-2008. Each academic year, departmental faculty members from two to four different departments worked with their liaison librarians to set student learning outcomes and plan a coordinated curriculum. Each department revised the research component and/or assignments in at least three courses: one at the beginning, one midpoint, and the last one towards the end of the degree program.

See the article "Turning the Tables: A Faculty-Centered Approach to Integrating Information Literacy" for more detailed information, or contact Ielleen Miller at imiller@ewu.edu or 509.359.4816.