Tuesday August 21, 2007ACS Fall National Meeting Partnering with the Libraries Chemical information instruction for a large freshmen core chemistry course Angie Locknar, Instruction Coordinator, Engineering and Science Libraries, MIT Prof. Donald R. Sadoway, John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry, MIT Kanak Kshetri, MIT undergraduate student

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Outline Our challenges How the collaboration began 3.093: Information Exploration – Becoming a Savvy Scholar Next Steps

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Our Challenge: the Libraries perspective How to reach a vast majority of first year undergraduates? How to do this without burdening staff? How to impart transferable skills, not specific to a discipline? How to do this without taking away from the already established subject specialist responsibilities?

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting 3.091: Introduction to Solid State Chemistry A required chemistry course, part of the core curriculum Taken by over half the incoming freshmen  Enrollment around 500 students  Most students will NOT be chemists Lecture plus recitations Homework problems, graded quizzes, final exams No laboratory work

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting How the collaboration began It all started with a research consultation… Library involvement in 3.091: Introduction to Solid State Chemistry in Fall 2005:  17 librarians in 27 recitation sections How to provide the same level of instruction to a large number of students and have it be meaningful?

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Integrating information literacy Applied for internal funding for “excellence in education”, granted in January 2006 Modify assignments in to incorporate information use Create online tutorials or modules to be viewed by the students on their timeline Use students to help create the content Not just for chemistry, setting the foundation for information seeking skills

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting How will we do all of this? How do we use student input effectively? What do we think freshmen need to learn? What do they know already? What do they THINK they know already? Do we have to incorporate this into in Fall 2006?

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting What developed Discussions about scalability, impact THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT!  3 credit course to learn more about the students, their habits, and their needs  Run it in parallel to to mimic integration in the course  Approved by Committee on the Undergraduate Program (CUP)

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting – Information Exploration: Becoming a Savvy Scholar The course:course  Lecture Lecture  Tutorials Tutorials  Tutorial review Tutorial review  Assignments Assignments  Research Logs Sample 1 Sample 2

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting – Information Exploration: Becoming a Savvy Scholar Assessment and Feedback  Assignments, tutorial feedback, research log  Card sorting exercise  Course evaluations  Pre/post self-confidence survey

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Self-Assessment

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Self-Assessment

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Self-Assessment

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Student feedback “Actual assignments for which we must physically visit libraries and for good search queries are essential.” “I’m confident that this material will make the rest of my research at MIT much easier” “The content wasn’t incredibly fascinating but is necessary to perform high quality scholarly research.” “Thank you. I learned a great deal in this class, and I hope that everyone can have access to these resources.”

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Survey of students – May of 12 students responded 5/5 took at least 1 course that required some library research (Communication Intensive) 4/5 used skills from “I’m only recently discovering how useful the class was, now that I have begun to use vera/barton more regularly to review current research in my field for my UROP and other projects.”

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Fall 2007 Create, modify, update tutorial modules Work with course TA’s and students to modify assignments in  Sample question In 1995 Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone.” 1. Cite the published article (not meeting abstract) in which they announced this discovery to the world. Format: MLA or ACS 2. What is the earliest article cited by the authors? 3. How many times has this article been cited by others? 4. When was this article first cited by someone affiliated with MIT? Determine assessment methods  Pre/post tests?  Assignments  Is this method a scalable way to reach students? If yes, can we also provide this in other Chemistry classes?

Tuesday August 21, 2007ACS Fall National Meeting Questions?

Tuesday August 21, 2007 ACS Fall National Meeting Links of interest OpenCourseWare page  3.093: Information Exploration: Becoming a Savvy Scholar (Fall 2006)  3.091: Introduction to Solid State Chemistry (Fall 2004) Angie Locknar,