Research-based learning -- endorsed by the Boyer Commission in Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities -- has the potential to invigorate undergraduate education. Successful implementation requires attention be directed toward developing students' abilities to thrive in this type of environment, supporting instructors' exploration of new teaching approaches in the classroom and online, and providing institutional resources to transform course curriculum while supporting the collaborations needed for sustainability. The University of California, Berkeley is committed to leveraging its research strength to enliven undergraduate learning by engaging undergraduates in research-based activities. Institutional support for this initiative has been provided at many levels along with a shared commitment from administrators, faculty, librarians, educational technologists and other pedagogical experts to redesign courses and assignments, re-energize large enrollment and core courses, and enable students to develop information and critical thinking skills both within and outside of the classroom. Key components of the Berkeley plan include: building a community of faculty dedicated to exploring new approaches for research-based learning; developing a library reconceived as a center for learning and instructional expertise; and creating opportunities for academic support units to work collaboratively to provide consultative support to faculty that can inform course design and implementation. This four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation (recently extended to June 2009) provides a model for other research universities. Berkeley will soon be releasing an Evaluation Report related to this project as well.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/mellon/
Redesign undergraduate courses to incorporate assignments that utilize library collections and support research-based learning.
Develop strong partnerships with and between faculty and other academic support unit staff in support of teaching and learning.
Enable students to develop information and critical thinking skills both within and outside of the classroom.
Forthcoming report from an Evaluation Consultant hired specifically to collect qualitative and quantitative data about the results of this project focused on three areas: impact on individual UC Berkeley faculty, impact on the campus culture of learning, and impact on student learning. The report and samples of evaluation instruments will be posted to the web site. Additionally a report from the Assessment Consultant with summaries of key courses, student surveys, and assignment rubrics will also be available soon and posted to the web site noted below.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/mellon/
Enriching the ways that students think about research and sharpening their skills to carry it out are major objectives of The Library. The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research recognizes excellence in undergraduate research projects that draw upon University Library collections and demonstrate use of sophisticated information literacy and research skills. Judges consider the product of the research, but focus on the research process: demonstration of library research skills, adept use of library resources, and reflection on the strategies used to investigate a research problem. Along with a research paper written for a course and the instructor's letter of support, the premiere component of the Library Prize application is a research essay in which students describe the research process that enabled them to locate the materials that informed their thinking. This essay provides insights into the undergraduate research process by requiring students to reflect upon their discovery process—gathering, evaluating, and synthesizing information. Many essays include revealing statements about personal setbacks and challenges, false starts, muddled thinking, desperate measures, and despair—all shared student experiences. The faculty who serve as judges for the Prize find the experience rewarding: "I learned a great deal from reading the Library Prize submissions in 2004, not the least of which was that we have the privilege to work with enormously talented students, especially when we encourage them to dig deeper." "The enthusiasm exhibited in the students' reflective essays was infectious. Reading the entries felt like a journey not only into the mind of a particular student but into the various library collections as well." Recent winners of the Library Prize come from many different departments—History, Music, Classics, Architecture, History of Art, and Molecular and Cell Biology—reminding us that library research is not just the domain of certain disciplines. And their research projects are sophisticated: the instructor who oversaw Gary Ku's "The People and Purpose of Trajan's Markets" says that the paper "sheds new light on the field." For his project "Macario Sakay and the Struggle for Kalayaan: Continuity in the Katipuana Guerilla Movement, 1892-1907," Joseph Scalice consulted manuscript collections in the Bancroft Library: "No scholars have ever consulted the Barrows Papers for information on Sakay, and Joseph has made some striking discoveries," says his instructor. This initiative began in 2004 and has served as the model for several other college and research libraries since, as well a been recognized by the Association of College and Research Libraries' Instruction Section as the 2005 Innovation in Instruction Award winner.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/researchprize/
Integrating the library into the campus’ undergraduate research initiative.
Acknowledging developmental stages of information literacy.
Engaging faculty in valuing and assessing information literacy skills.
Although we have not conducted a formal assessment we have some indicators of the benefit of this program.
We have received 50-120 submissions each year for the Library Prize.
Faculty who have served as judges in this process routinely comment on the increased awareness they have about the need to focus on this aspect of research assignments; many of these faculty wrote strong letters of support of this program and led to this project receiving the 2006 Educational Initiatives Award on campus.
The student essays themselves are rich with information about how students approach research; these essays have been instructive to the faculty, librarians, and other students who see the award winning projects spotlighted in exhibits throughout the year.
Stories about the Library Prize winners are often highlighted in the Library's Fiat Lux publication (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/fiatlux.html ) sent to library friends, donors and staff.
Various campus libraries have developed tutorials over the past eight years, primarily using Adobe Captivate and Camtasia. These cover a range of approaches such as procedural (connecting to library resources from off-campus), database specific (BIOSIS), tool specific (Refworks), discipline or resource specific (Congressional Research), and process focused (evaluating full text scholarly content online). Librarians can create links to these tutorials from their course-specific web pages. The Library is pursuing approaches to integrate these resources into the campus learning management system, library catalog and other starting points for research. Terry Huwe has been experimenting with a variety of web 2.0 tools for libraries which are described in his ACRL presentation: "Getting Started with Your Library 2.0 Game Plan."
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/faculty/huwe/ACRL07.ppt
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Help/tutorials.html
NA
The Anthromap site originated with a wall-size map displayed as part of an exhibit Anthropology at Berkeley: A Century of Pathbreaking Scholarship, 1901-2001. For that project, map tacks placed at the field-site location for each of Berkeley's Ph.D. dissertations provided a quick overview of the geographic concentration of UC Berkeley's doctoral program in anthropology from its inception to the present. Four colors of tacks, each representing a 25-year period, provided a snapshot of the growth of the department in its first century. The present project expands on the static map with the development of an interactive map allowing for other views of dissertation work done in Anthropology at Berkeley. The initial database of dissertations used for this project were those completed for the Ph.D. in Anthropology at UC Berkeley between 1901 and July 24, 2002. Future dissertations will be incorporated annually thereafter. A multi-field search feature allows for a "search all" function, or targeted fields as desired. The search results are displayed on the map with red markers. Detailed search results in text format are simultaneously presented on the right. The interactive map interface was created using features of the free-for-use Google Maps API. The dissertation records dataset was prepared using Microsoft Access and Excel, and is interactively queried and displayed using a combination of PHP and MySQL, connected to the map interface by AJAX technology. All imagery is provided by Google Maps, and is subject to the terms of use and license agreements as established by Google Maps. Detail and quality varies depending on the region of the world. The date of the imagery is noted at the bottom of the map interface, according to the information provided by Google.
http://anthromap.lib.berkeley.edu/
NA
In Victoria Robinson's Ethnic Studies 21AC course this semester, she is using the wiki tool in bSpace (the campus learning management system) to support the course's Research Discovery Project (RDP). This research project was the result of Dr. Robinson's participation in the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship for Undergraduate Research in which the Library partnered with faculty to design and implement research-based learning assignments in large-enrollment undergraduate courses. Faculty were encouraged to use online collaborative tools supported by campus to support their goals of engaging students with library collections, information literacy, and critical thinking. In this course, students are required to compile primary source material on a variety of themes, upload the material to the resources tool, and then use the wiki tool as a place to work in groups to list, describe, and discuss their findings. The goal is to end up with a thorough and well-organized space for each theme and its primary sources. An increasing number of instructors are using their course sites to deliver rich media such as video clips, audio, and images.
See above
NA