Bridging the gap between sustainability and impact: The relationship between librarian involvement and the efficacy of information literacy instruction
Date
2021-10-29
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Abstract
This study was undertaken in an effort to understand what is needed to build lasting bridges between teaching faculty and librarian information literacy (IL) instruction. This study took advantage of a unique opportunity to compare IL instructional efficacy between librarian and non-librarian instructors teaching exactly the same content in a full-term course; it utilizes text analysis of student assignments to measure and evaluate IL skill development across four levels of librarian involvement (one-shot instruction, two levels of embeddedness, and librarian as instructor-of-record) in IL instruction within an undergraduate university course. The results are somewhat surprising, but nevertheless highly suggestive of the argument that the benefit to student IL skills is not related to amount of librarian instruction, but rather to the level of instructor buy-in with regard to library services and the importance of IL skills. We argue that the most impactful librarian involvement is as an information literacy consultant rather than a full-time embedded librarian (which is somewhat surprising given the literature on the efficacy of embeddedness). The study results have salient implications on academic librarian instructional practices and collaborations on course content with faculty members.
Description
Lightning Strike Presentation, 2021 ALAO Annual Conference
Keywords
information literacy, embedded librarianship, inquiry based learning, text analysis
Citation
Murphy, J. E., Lenart, B., Stoeckle, M. (2022, October 27-29). Bridging the gap between sustainability and impact: The relationship between librarian involvement and the efficacy of information literacy instruction [Lightning Strike Presentation]. 2021 ALAO Annual Conference, Virtual.