Interdisciplinary Inquiry (BIS 300) is a collaborative effort between the University of Washington Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (IAS) faculty and staff of the Library, Writing Center, and Quantitative Skills Center. Considerable variation appears in the themes, readings, and assignments in individual sections of the course as instructors, librarians, and academic staff innovate and experiment with different pedagogies and assignments. What holds this required multi-section course together are the ongoing quarterly meetings and consultations among the Writing Center and Quantitative Skills Center staff, librarians, and IAS instructors who teach the course. The purpose of BIS 300 is to introduce and orient students to upper-division work in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program. This includes an introduction to the use and keeping of portfolios, and an orientation to the IAS program portfolio and assessment process, including its four core learning objectives. The course stresses interdisciplinary inquiry, the richness of the resource environment in IAS (and at UWB), and the program’s focus on interdisciplinary forms of inquiry. It encourages students to think about how various types of knowledge are produced, and how they can learn to think and act as researchers by becoming active, creative, and self-critical makers of knowledge in academic and non-academic genres. For many students, the start of their IAS career marks a significant transition toward more difficult texts and assignments, as well as a research culture that produces and consumes those materials. Orienting and introducing students to the program works well, we have found, if we make explicit the expectations, processes, and ways of approaching material that upper-level interdisciplinary work in IAS demands. Librarians and faculty often team-teach a series of 3-4 workshops for each section of this course. These workshops are designed to fully integrate the processes of research, reading and critical thinking, with faculty and librarians sharing “ownership” for facilitating discussions and hands-on activities. Workshops typically focus on developing students’ abilities formulate complex research questions, and to locate and analyze sources from a wide range of disciplines/fields and publication types.
Understand the interdisciplinary production of knowledge and how it underwrites different aspects of the IAS program, including an orientation to the Program’s diverse and inter-related (inter)disciplinary fields and methods of inquiry.
Become better critical thinkers, readers, and writers, capable of posing and addressing a variety of complex questions, and writing in a variety of modes. As part of this process, become more skilled at critical self-reflection on one’s work.
Become better researchers, able to use the resources at UWB and elsewhere in order to identify existing and complementary scholarly work while producing original knowledge through data gathering and interpretation. We have paid particular attention to the development and refinement of research questions that stretch across disciplines, and the ability to identify research questions in other scholarly writing.
Librarians participate in the Program’s annual assessment activities, which focus each year on one of the four learning goals: Critical Thinking, Shared Leadership and Collaboration, Interdisciplinary Research, and Writing and Presentation. This assessment process includes adapting or creating a rubric for the learning goal, using the rubric to assess student work, and conducting focus groups with graduating seniors. Aspects of information literacy are particularly evident in the Critical Thinking and Interdisciplinary Research rubrics.
The University Libraries Instruction and Information Literacy Working Group has been successful in forging collaborations on campus. IIL members have partnered with the UW Center for Instructional Development and Research (CIDR) and the UW Teaching Academy to provide programs for UW faculty and graduate students. In the past year, IIL has also collaborated with CIDR and the Teaching Academy to support faculty learning. In winter 2007 and 2008, IIL librarians provided a 3 hour faculty workshop on "Helping Students Do the Right Thing: Preventing Plagiarism through Assignment Design" in which librarian facilitators guide teaching faculty through ways to revise and devise learning-focused assignments. The facilitators discuss with faculty frequent causes of plagiarism (many unintentional) and assignment formats and requirements that can circumvent the typical pitfalls that lead to plagiarism. Participants are given time to work in groups to revise their own assignments by making use of the ideas and tools presented in the workshop.
Heighten faculty awareness of plagiarism.
Help design assignments that minimize student plagiarism.
Evaluations of the workshop provided useful information. Inquiries from other faculty who learned about the workshops from their colleagues were seen as positive impact. High attendance at training sessions demonstrated audience preference for the content. Responses and comments to several questions dealing with info lit/plagiarism on the Libraries 2007 triennial survey will help to inform future design of the program.
Individual consultations are a great opportunity to teach information literacy skills to users because the literature searching examples are based in the reality of the user's needs at the moment. While the user is able to follow and grasp points made during the consultation, they often leave with insufficient notes to recall the search techniques, strategies and the reasoning involved. In order to reinforce concepts and techniques covered during these sessions, librarians in the Health Sciences Library started video capturing the screen activity and posting the video online for the user to refer to at his/her convenience. Informal feedback indicates this method of information literacy instruction has been well received.
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WorldCat Local WorldCat Local (WCL), a new service offering from OCLC. WCL provides seamless access to local, consortial, and worldwide holdings; over 30 million article citations; and integrates three delivery streams -- all through one interface. The service interoperates with local circulation, resource sharing and resolution to full text services to create a seamless experience for the end user. Throughout the development, our goal was to eliminate "dead ends" within and between our myriad discovery and delivery systems. The greatest impact of WCL has undoubtedly been in resource sharing. Before the implementation of WCL, we estimated that approximately half of our users hit a "dead end" when a local catalog search produced no usable results. From that point, few users found/searched our consortial catalog and even fewer were able to find and request materials via our interlibrary loan service. Since last April, consortial borrowing by UW users is up on average 65% from the year before and Interlibrary Loan requests are double what they were before WCL. In short, users are finally able to discover and access a much larger range of materials than ever before. The system has been improved through user feedback. In conjunction with staff from OCLC, the University of Washington has conducted two rounds of usability testing and is looking forward to learning more from the testing planned at the University of California system. Additionally, user feedback from surveys, email comments/questions, and usage statistics have been used to inform design decisions.
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Moveable Type, open source blog software chosen by the Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Washington, has provided the perfect forum to support patient care decisions and resident teaching by the University of Washington Medicine Residents. Resident Report occurs 4 times weekly and is attended by residents, faculty members, medical students and a clinical librarian to discuss patients who have been admitted the previous night to University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC), a 400 bed tertiary care hospital in Seattle, Washington. Sherry Dodson, Clinical Librarian, listens for patient care questions at Resident Report, quickly searches PubMed, and posts relevant citations to the blog to answer those questions. Often within minutes of posing the questions, residents can find citations to support their patient care decisions. The blog is easily searchable and the 500+ blog entries are arranged by categories such as infectious diseases, pulmonary diseases, etc. and archived by date. The Movable Type Personal Publishing software is easy to use and provides a sharing point or living searchable archive accessible to the residents at all of their rotations or in their clinics. Although the UW Health Sciences Libraries provide a huge network of electronic resources on the UW HealthLinks web site, a clinical librarian can provide a highly valued service by pinpointing the most recent, evidence-based articles to support patient care. An additional blog supports case presentations by the Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine department’s fellows at their weekly Chest Conference. Nurses on one of UWMC’s inpatient units are also considering the use of a new blog to support their upcoming journal club.
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