 Let me welcome you all to the spring 2017 CNI member meeting, and let me welcome you also to Albuquerque I am delighted that so many of you have been able to join us and We have a very very rich program over the next day and a half Which I think you'll enjoy Just a couple of things Before we get started first off I would like to welcome our international visitors international travel is getting ever more interesting and I appreciate those of you who Went through that to join us In that vein also, I want to recognize Three new members who have joined since our last meeting and interestingly enough They are all international members I'd like to welcome the guitar national library The University of Limerick and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada Thank you all and I welcome you to CNI So we have a treat for you today We have a keynote speaker that I think will be familiar to some of you and Should be familiar to a lot more of you I Have been I guess I'd describe it as an admirer of Allison had's work from a bit of a distance over the years Joan Lipincott has had a chance to work a bit more closely with her including doing a marvelous interview that appeared on Allison's blog A couple of months ago and I'm going to invite her to More fully introduce Allison and then she and I are going to sit down so we can see the slides So Joan Thanks, Cliff I'm delighted to introduce our opening plenary speaker Allison head executive director and principal investigator of project information literacy Currently Allison is also a research scientist at the Meta lab at Harvard and a visiting scholar at University of Nebraska Lincoln's University Libraries This year she was awarded the inaugural ST Lee lectureship in library leadership and innovation at Harvard libraries For many years she was affiliated with the University of Washington iSchool and Allison earned her PhD in information science from UC Berkeley It's critically important that library and information Professionals have data about their students in order to make informed decisions about such concerns as developing services and partnering with faculty on pedagogy and curriculum as Information professionals we also need to understand the gaps in what we expect students to do with information what they actually do with information and Students own perceptions of their information expertise since 2008 project information literacy has been asking probing and Perceptive questions about how today's college students are accessing and using information in their studies their everyday lives and Their first work experience after graduation the project employs a team and and Has worked with over 60 higher ed institutions of all types and they've published nine open access reports on their findings The quantitative data that Allison provides in report Reports help us understand the broad trends and Identifies areas in which libraries should focus more attention or develop new strategies What is often intrigued me the most is the qualitative data that project information literacy presents Hearing the students voices in quotes from interviews has sometimes fed my own Imagination and encouraged me to think in new ways of what libraries can do to educate students Beyond traditional information literacy sessions They prompt me to examine underlying assumptions of my own and of the library profession Project information literacy is also provided insights into students use of library space and library space planning efforts in a recent report. I Encourage you to visit the project information literacy website Not only will you find the reports but interviews and thank you Allison for the recent interview of me and Also a section called practical project Information literacy which highlights some examples of how various libraries have acted on findings of the report Please join me in welcoming Allison had We had some technical problems. What would what would a plenary speech be like if you didn't have technical problems? I was so proud. I had my new math book And nothing really worked on it So then I have to thank Angelo for his brilliance and I've learned an important lesson come early Like 1130 when you're speaking at 115. So welcome. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you can see my slides And I'm glad to be using my new map book $1,500 later So Welcome everybody Joan. Thank you for for your introduction I think you've researched me better probably than my parents ever did I mean I had a difficult time as my father used to say I know what you do is important But I just not sure what that is So hopefully over the next hour. I'll be able to convince you of that and what I do I'm gonna stand here because a mobile Microphone isn't possible with my tensile shirt It's been a day like that. So can everybody here right in here. I am Can everybody hear me, please? Yes, okay. Hey, turn it around. Okay Here we are in this room a lot of you I don't know a lot of times I speak at conferences. I give a keynote And I run into a lot of people So earlier today, I was introducing myself to a lot of people over coffee and I've had some great conversations this morning And I'm glad I prepared this slide as a way to pull us together and also Kick off CNI for this year and that is the connections we have in the room How many of you are deans of? academic University libraries just raise your hand you don't need to usually you're not a shy lot Okay, that's it's got quite a few How about those that work in infotech whether you're a CIO? I know there are CIOs. I recognize some of the names from the list Great, there's Patrick who I know who gave me a tour of Northeastern and recognize some faces after I said I didn't and then also Who am I leaving out? I know of course foundations funding of course. Yes funding Who comes from foundations or organizations that work to support? Libraries and work in this area. Oh Don't be shy. I won't ask you for money. Okay until later. Okay. Okay. So the foundation folks Anybody sometimes we get public librarians None, okay, and we've got some international attendees as well And then there were also librarians that work in a number of different capacities that I'm not leaving out I'm saving you for last. How many do we have in that category? Okay, any professors and and I don't mean tenure track somebody from a different department Okay, anybody. Oh There you go. What department? Computers, okay, makes sense computer science Anybody else that I've left out that during Q&A will tell me they were offended because I left them out I'm hedging my bets Okay, there we are. I think what this slide shows is some of the overlap and interests that we have I mean all of us I think are committed to Higher education and especially within that space libraries and by libraries Often the use of these different bubbles. I have above it resources and resources have changed dramatically as well as the way that we deliver them as well as even our Conception of what libraries are when I worked on the learning space study that we just finished that came out earlier late last year actually it really came to me that libraries themselves and the mission as we know Has really changed as we all know from collections to becoming really active learning hubs and what that means for a particular campus how it can reflect the needs the teaching and learning needs as Well as the IT needs one of the major findings in that study was that from the qualitative interviews where we profiled 22 different recent library space projects was That in building those new structures from the ground up or renovating them what we found was Surprisingly plugs was one of the areas that was a best practice That librarians beat their head against the wall trying to convince architects of the importance of plugs it's really symbolic of not only the learning but how learning takes place and How recharge stations and how mobile and ubiquitous Technology has woven into the work we do Where I fall in this discussion is let me go back here Where I fall in this discussion is in the arena of teaching and learning. I'm interested in students I was a professor for 25 years and I'll tell you a short anecdote. I have time I'll tell you a short anecdote. I taught new media. I taught at st. Mary's College It's a small liberal arts college in the San Francisco Bay area and One day my star student came up to me senior year And this is a conversation that probably happens a lot and she came up and said Can I talk to you alone? I thought You know, you know a small Catholic school. I thought I hope you're not pregnant or you know something Or you know, you got married last weekend She waited till everybody cleared out and then she said I Know you know how to use the library Yeah, she said I'm working on my thesis. I've never used the library here and Coincidentally we had just gotten a job at Google and I said, let me walk you over and Introduced her to a librarian that was actually a former student of mine and at that point I became really interested In how I had taught for so many years and here I really imagined the research process for course research Being something very different than was actually occurring and I did a small study at st. Mary's and Ended up writing something for first Monday in college and research libraries and Somebody from the Midwest a librarian wrote me and said that's a really interesting article But none of that would ever happen at my big public school And I thought that's really interesting in itself and that's an invitation Luckily Joe Brannon was the editor at the time of college and research libraries He told me they had gotten a lot of reaction to the piece I told him about the Midwest concern and he said I'll be in your sample now. You have two schools and from then from that point forward PIL came into being and it grew and what we've done what we've tried to do I ended up going to University of Washington and Really had the great honor of working with Mike Eisenberg Who I think is giving a keynote in South Carolina right at this moment now with Dave Lancas, but Mike Eisenberg it became head and Eisenberg and We both were interested in information literacy and as he told me I'm there to mentor you and Sure, it can be head and Eisenberg all retired in a few years and I said well, I can't move I live in, California and My husband's an attorney and he's not going to take the Washington bar and he said oh, we don't have office space Okay, well you sure it's head and Eisenberg and I can and I can lead and he said oh That's not a problem. I won't be here in four years. You can always call me, but I won't be here Who is this guy who's runs the eye he had run the iSchool and founded it and I said well Do we have a deal and he said? Yeah deal And I said okay great. We'll get started and he said oh Allison. You didn't ask about money And if you know Mike it was a great response and Mike taught me a lot about money and funders and we were lucky enough during that tenure to be funded by IMLS a couple of different times MacArthur for over two years and then just recently last week We were funded. This is new news by Sloan and Sloan Foundation is going to fund us with something we're Going to build actually as part of a larger project for the open syllabus project OSP so we're really excited about that. That's a project that my young friend brilliant friend Dennis Tannen And I envisioned him 90% me 10 While we were at the Berkman so what PIL is and what it's growing into is Call it PIL is the acronym This is a study that really has grown its sample in a grassroots way in giving presentations talking about our findings often people think we're much larger than we are we do large studies with small teams and Often the teams are made up like of what academic librarians who have taken a leave to work with me on PIL on a specific study that they have an interest in and that's something that grew in an organic way and it has worked Really well for us. So we'll work with four or five people Often people will call PIL and the number and if I answer the phone they say god Allison head I didn't think you'd answer the phone. I always say if I didn't no one did you know No one would be able to answer the phone So we're a small organization that tries to do really large studies Something that I'm I'm really proud of and I'm glad that we've done Both as a researcher and as somebody in education is to include community colleges in our sample It's not just for your public and privates We have over 260 campuses Someone told me recently boy, that's access to one in eight college students in the US I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate But we're US focused the library learning space study actually we included a couple of library projects that occurred in Canada and We use social science methods We use surveys. We use interviews. We've used content analysis and we're ongoing and National and that's kind of been our marching orders. We we don't I don't have a school I mean I work at University of Nebraska as a visiting scholar and Also, I've been a fellow or affiliated with Harvard now for seven years But since I am no longer at UW. I really don't have a school per se And this has been a good thing for the project in a lot of ways because we've been able to do our studies I've been able to go into different settings This works well with students and talk to them about how they conduct research how their habits are Changing even in those short four years and then be able to pause and say I'm not from here You can tell me whatever is going on for you and then pause because they're in disbelief And then I'll say because you'll never see me again And at that point we found the flood waters open That students really did have stories to tell my background was in journalism And that was really my interest was to tell students stories like the first student that came and talked to me after class I know a couple of years ago You had Esther Hargitay speak who I know from the Berkman's a colleague and a friend and MacArthur often asked us or often asked me how are you different than Esther and I'm different than Esther and we've laughed about this in that I focus on behaviors and really collect qualitative as well As we use mixed methods if you care about different methodologies. It's an analytical study where we look for trends Relationships rigorous relationships between the different variables that are in our sample and then we choose really different schools Sometimes people ask me why is Harvard always in your studies? Well, it's not but it's has been in a number of our studies and Usually because it's such an outlier in terms of the resources it has and also in terms of the students that it attracts And at the other end will include a community college somewhere that Students that has a lot of certificate programs and such maybe students go on to four-year schools and we'll look at What is across that continuum? How are students the same and how do they differ? I have to admit Harvard has more Wikipedia users That didn't make them happy But anyway, that's kind of the lay of the land of what we do and how we're structured Briefly, I'll go through a timeline to talk about where this journey has taken us this research the first study that we did was actually funded by ProQuest and They went on a listserv that librarians frequented through a LA listservs and said, you know, we've got some money and we want to find out about students and this was in 2008 and So I approached them and talked to them a long time and we did the first small study Which I think was six or eight Different institutions. I think I saw Lisa Hinch lift earlier and she there she is and she I don't know How many times you can listen to the PIL story, but there you are you're you're a good supporter So, okay, thanks. I think you're right by the microphone and I know you're gonna get up and say what's new Okay, but Lisa was in that sample at University of Illinois in Urbana And we started with the question of really an information literacy question of how do students find Information for course related research, but we expanded that question also into their everyday life Their everyday life worlds, what kinds of things a lot of people said Oh, that's probably gonna be barbettes or where movies are playing But we actually found that everyday life research was more risky for students and that as one student said you know writing a course paper is about my skills my ability my knowledge and everyday life research is about Making purchasing decisions making choices where it has its last much longer than a semester And so we found kind of an interesting contrast there that resulted actually that interest you in a piece for first Monday on Everyday life research After there was a lot of interest in that study and I'll come back to that and in in a couple of slides But there was a lot of interest in that study and so we went on and asked about this was MacArthur funded This was a large study for us. It's probably our most cited work Where we looked at how do students evaluate and actually use information in their lives? We ended up again Quantitatively testing a model that we had developed in the very first study a preliminary model of The research process for students today both in the course lives as what their academic lives as well as in their everyday lives at that point I Do I should never read my press But I do and I obsess about it I have to say and somebody said what about technology I mean, you know why I was in PIL looking at technology and we had an opportunity at that point to do The multitasking study where it's probably my favorite study I've never heard someone say it's theirs, but I found it fascinating from a sampling point of view we went into libraries and I think there were about eight libraries in the sample during crunch time two weeks before finals and It's an interesting IRB challenge, but it got through and we interviewed students About what they were doing in the library At the time there was a lot of concern and discussion that students just went to the library to look at Facebook So we also looked at their laptops, which ended up being the technology that most of them had And said what are you running on your laptop right now? So we were able to actually collect data From from the actual occurrence that was going on in their lives at that point and talk to them about that At that point, this is just the lay of the land at that point I was then a Berkman at Harvard and through that experience. I thought Talking to economists to attorneys to anthropologists to young people from MIT Media Lab and I thought What's really interesting is a much bigger question and we've answered some of these smaller questions, but what's interesting is What kinds of we ended up calling it the what kinds of critical? information transitions Do students young people go through in their lives? We've had older people in our sample, but for the most part we tend to have probably 22 to 26 year olds in our sample and What was that process like that passage process from one information setting to the next what constraints? Did they face what workarounds we ended up calling it strategic adaptive strategies? Did they develop and how did the process continue? We the passage studies I think is some of our most important work Because the first study focused on a sample that we had left out for a long time first-year college students We knew they were different because they were coming into the college setting They weren't like the season junior or senior or even the sophomore and what was that experience like and Then the second study that we did I'm going to talk about some of these findings the second study that we did was funded by IMLS with a planning grant and we ended up focusing on the workplace and that study We interviewed 20 employers as well as 20 as well as doing focus groups with recent grads and what was it like to solve information problems something that resonated with employers in the workplace and For employers, how did they make their hires and Kind of a spoiler alert they tended to be dazzled by students that knew technology and then gravely Disappointed when students didn't pick up the phone to ask a question or ask the person next to him and checked on Google instead and That was a fascinating finding in itself and then to go and talk to the recent grads that had graduated within the last Seven years. How was it out there? How what how was it similar to what they had gone through in college? How was it different? What was it like? I think one of my favorite quotes from that study was someone that said a Harvard student actually that was a congressional aide at the time over in Boston and he said The thing that really after all this that was most like my job today from college was when my choral group and I put on a performance and In other words a co-curricular activity and we put on a performance in One of the spaces on campus and all of a sudden I'd seen a legal agreement for the first time The other thing is someone said well you better license the music you're gonna play and you have parking for disabled and So and so sick and can't make it and the caterer doesn't do gluten-free and he said that's really what workplace Information seeking is like for me and that was very different than my experience here at Harvard I was trained in certain areas, but it was that constant crisis the fact that information moves so quickly and that the answer wasn't on Google and That it really did take something that was collegial that was a breakthrough for us. That's that particular study The following study is our largest study. It's the lifelong learning study funded generously by IMLS They believed in this study And we looked at we we actually looked at the workplace again, but more the growth of conceptual knowledge and Things that would really affect professional development instead of putting out fires at work And then we also looked at personal life and found out there was a tremendous need for life skills in students lives, especially interpersonal communication But not in the way that you might think in the way that students can't talk more in the way that students have trouble With delegating to someone older than themselves Was something that came out, but there were also they're not very sure that sure they can negotiate for a grade But negotiating for a salary is different The last category that we looked at in the lifelong learning study was something that really interested me And that was based on something that actually Kate Cronteris at the Berkman was doing with Google on A political awareness of young people and how they follow different trends So we talked some and we ended up asking a question not about online community, but about community involvement What happened after graduation? At that point these are the last two. This is where we've been headed on this trajectory We looked as Joan referenced and really thankful to have her for our smart talk Is what we call the interview series and it's up on the PIL site We looked at library learning spaces because since PIL had started Libraries had changed dramatically even in those last eight or nine years and How they were providing services and the growth and the evolution from information centers to learning commons to Learning spaces and how was that and all of a sudden libraries were brimming in those places and how had the research process Changed how what kinds of services were being provided? How did librarians and architects to very different cultures? Come together and work and create things like Hunt Library And how was that kind of Changing the whole side of pedagogy and support of pedagogy and librarians jobs and deans jobs librarians jobs in particular librarians were became boundary spanners to be successful and Those that didn't tended to be isolated in their building Lastly, here's where we are today something new for you Lisa Here's where we are today. We're looking at I'm coming full circle and With the learning spaces study and beginning to look at change I'm asking how students have changed in what has been a 10-year journey for us Where I think we're at nine years sometimes it feels like a hundred But I think we're at nine years and how have their process has changed We know some of the tools have changed The availability for instance in focus groups that we're doing because we're doing focus groups at a number of different institutions the growing use of YouTube for Really kind of bolstering what they're learning in class Just the makeup of students that are replying to the invitation to participate in the focus groups is different All of a sudden I'm not seeing humanity students We're seeing students in the sciences and the engineering So we're making some inroads there into understanding what their needs are and this is where we hear the great use of YouTube For instance the physics lecture, but there's more to it than that the idea that you could go on YouTube and search for instance MIT and Find an MIT professor talking about micro arrays or talking about an equation that you do in physics And as one student said at UCLA actually at the beginning of last month You have to understand when you hear a student do a video They talk about Where you get stuck? Professors don't Professors present the equation it looks really easy and then I get home, and I think what? But the equation was so easy in class. This is different for the homework. How do I do this? So we're finding this use of these support tools certainly some libraries are creating their own But students how they're evaluating what a good YouTube video is and how that's integrating into their process of research and perhaps one of the Saddest things I've heard from the field is a student This is a wake-up call that said all I need to know what's gotten me through four years in college is command F I don't use book. I don't use books. I don't like indices. It's command F Give me everything's online, and that's how I find different information But that kind of precision and these are students talking about their search strategies something that we haven't heard about in the past They're swapping techniques that they use in these sessions in other words they're becoming More sophisticated at least the students will follow it with a survey and be able to test this more empirically But they're really becoming Sophisticated in the areas that a number of us have MLS is in I mean they're thinking about search and they're thinking about search strategies Across all of this just to bring it back home Really what our study is about is about how today's students find and use information. That's my elevator pitch That's my pitch on the plane when someone says what do you do and I say I study college students and they say what What do you study about them? Can I ask? Hesitantly and I say I study how they find and use information They usually pick up a magazine at that point or they ask me where they're senior and or junior in high school What the best school is? Of course, we know it doesn't quite work like that from each one of the studies that I just profiled here You can find them on the PIL site. We made a decision early on that our materials would be open access and Available and we would not charge we'd issue gray literature, but we'd also do Academic pieces in open access journals as well. So we publish a lot in first Monday But within that range of studies, this has been our calling. This is the question. This is our true north Each one of these studies has produced. I don't know between 20 and 50 different findings I will not go through all those findings with you. What I will do though is simplify it and talk about What the research takeaways are from what we've learned from this group of studies? The first one is this is where we started with the finding study and that is students When we went out in the field in that very first study Said that something that we found really paradoxical and that was that the research process is more difficult than ever before not more this is what's great about a focus group not more difficult for them and senior year versus sophomore year senior year in high school, but more difficult overall that it just Finding information had drastically changed when we asked and I've done this before when we asked for a series of adjectives And we've asked this in a number of our follow-up studies and they say stay somewhat similar This isn't particularly good news for those that teach or work with students But there's a story here. That's worth explaining and that is a number of students said that they really were afraid of Conducting research as one student said to us. What if I pick a topic that fails me and Again in a focus group. I followed up with it and said fail you in terms of a bad grade It's like no fails me that there's not enough depth to it Or that I can't get the paper out of it or that there's too much information So it's this gauging process of information that is particularly challenging for students What I have in the red type here is yet another kind of a layover of the findings and that is In the red you see that two very different adjectives and this came from our study of first-year students that students were both excited Sounds good and overwhelmed and when I thought about that what we ended up doing was something called a ratio analysis and With the ratio analysis I backtracked where the interviews from those in the first year Study had gone to high school and then I compared I used their Facebook pages actually to find out where they had Gone to high school and of course you'd put that up there on your Facebook page if you were first-year college student where you were from and I backtracked and contacted each high school library and Then did a comparison in this ratio analysis of The increase in size that students go through in these primary library resources That they encounter and the first was that the library collection across our sample here was nine times larger In the college where they were enrolled. There's also community colleges in this sample as well as four-year colleges so the library collection was Very large to them and somewhat overwhelming where it gets interesting is there were 16 times more librarians professional librarians and this became really apparent when I made the rounds and called high school librarians and you Realized it was a one-person shop if that high school was lucky enough to have a librarian and Often during the time I was talking to them on the phone You'd hear them say things like don't perk your bike over there or I can help you in a minute or do you need a ride home? It really was a community and a community resource where we know from academic libraries that librarians professional librarians faculty whatever title they have have a number of different silo functions that often over overlap in committee work, but they have unique Job descriptions and this was particularly problematic how to read that environment For first-year college students that they weren't sure who to ask for help I mean, I think that's the common response to that list of adjectives Why aren't they asking? Librarians or somebody else for help they didn't know who to ask for instance a student at Harvard said I Was looking sounds good to start with I was looking for a journal article that I found through PubMed and I went I couldn't find it online and So I went to the shelf to look for the journal and that particular year was checked out or was somewhere in the library and I looked around and I thought Who do I go to? It's a good comment actually do I go to circulation? Because if I go to circulation, they may have the text or that particular issue the bound periodical or do I go to reference? And where did they tell me reference wise and on Lamont library? It's actually down the floor It's not out. I think they've moved it out. They keep playing with that But the last one also I think is these increase is the number of databases and This is without Harvard in the sample Harvard actually I think had a thousand three databases. It took them a Month to answer the question when I asked them how many they'd never counted how many databases that they had and talked to a Number of people there But without Harvard in the sample the students on average at these institutions that they ended up going to college in Were faced with 19 times more databases, but as one first-year student pointed out to me What's important to realize is Even though your high school might have had something that was pro-quest as she said I had Pro-quest at my high school, but this interface looks totally different. I had the training wheels model of Pro-quest in I loved it I had the training wheel model of Pro-quest while while I was in high school and I thought oh Pro-quest I can do this paper in no time and I looked at it And it looked nothing like I had spent so much time learning in high school So this transferability of skills is Is particularly problematic? We're dropping down call We're dropping down students or they're being dropped down into environments that are very different for them And to their credit some libraries actually academic libraries have started working with high schools to Orient students before they go to that particular Institution where they've been accepted Harvard actually in Sue Gilroy who used to be on our study. It's on practical PIL Had developed a video Actually, it's really great. Yeah, I think it's a video that she it's up on YouTube, but it's on our practical PIL page that is sent to Students over the summer before they enter Harvard about what research is like at Harvard and it pulls and integrates a lot of PIL's findings without saying that and Talks to them about the difficulties they might encounter based on what we had found Really what we can conclude from this research takeaway is the shift this profound shift From scarcity of information where you used to be able to do a research project and say no stone unturned I can guarantee it to an abundance of information that is impossible to keep up with and you find this subtle shift of moving from knowing facts to gathering consensus and Finding three sources that pretty much say the same thing and you'll call it good. This is a significant departure for the research process The next takeaway that I want to talk about builds on this when it what is more most difficult for students during the research process and What we found was using a scale and using results from our 2010 study I'd like to test this again, but I think from the focus groups It's pretty much held and from what we found is getting started on assignments and Here's some data. It's just a version of the data that we found where students run into trouble This was kind of a game changer for some librarians because they had put their emphasis on teaching students search and Using the different resources. Yes, it's problematic, but it's that first step of the research process which is really defining and narrowing down a research topic and What you find here is that as what we concluded here is that students often said Conducting research for courses is like gambling It's an interesting metaphor You don't know if you're going to choose a topic that's going to work You don't know if that topic is going to satisfy what your professor wants and you really don't know if you'll be able to capture it well and Collect enough information to have a college level paper and you can see where there is whether it's gambling or not There is a lot of risk Associated for as one student said the most difficult part of research is getting to the question to ask and Again hedging your bets trying to figure out a topic Even if you're we found a really interesting trend at UCLA again where professors really promoted discovery and In the focus group Students some in social sciences would say I know we could write on anything. We wanted and it was supposed to be on housing inequality And it's like no that's good, you know, that's exploration That's what you're hoping you don't want something narrowly defined You have all these resources to help you discover what interests you Especially at this time in your life and that may help shape where you go or what your interests are or where you end up working But that point wasn't was missed. It wasn't seen as an invitation to Discovery now not all professors do that, but I think today in the field We're finding an interesting trend of how professors have changed some professors have changed their assignments and how students are Responding to that This is a model that we developed in really looking at if research is difficult More difficult than ever before if difficulties start with beginning research What are these frustrations about is there a thread running through the different conversations? interviews as well as the quantitative data that we've collected that can tell us in a way what the student research process is and What we came up with was a model and this is definitely an adjustable model This model changes probably for every student and every research topic that they conduct and what class or discipline that they're in And what the different constraints are But we found there are four different research contexts that take up time For students at the beginning that are laborious if you work with students if you work in reference Or if you have in your past or if you're in instruction, this probably resonates with you The first is needed most often and that is big-picture context and what that is is getting a summary of what something is about and Getting your arms around it a student in one of our focus groups at a CSU Actually said I was writing a paper on the US's the United States policy in the South China Seas in a public policy class and he said You know, I needed to go and find out what it had been in the past and What it was now and had it changed in the last week and his go-to tool any guesses? Wikipedia you know and then always saying You can never cite Wikipedia. We've written actually a paper about the use of Wikipedia That we did it was published in first Monday and the reason student use students use Wikipedia And it is often to obtain this big-picture context, but it's a little bit more Not only do they get language context in the meaning of different words. They also get something Succinct they get citations actually through footnotes. We heard that but they also get something succinct as one student said You have to understand Wikipedia is my here's a word for you research process What it helps me it's not real research It's just figuring out what research is going to be and At another institution small liberal arts college a student said it's the point oh five step They know they're not Doing real research at that point But they're really trying to decide on those problematic areas of coming up with a topic and that tool works particularly well as well as you also hear newspaper articles New York Times does often good summaries Students know to use these resources so not all students are going to wikipedia But wikipedia gives certain assurances and what we've heard now in the focus groups that we've been doing since January is one student said I Love what I do when I'm in the field because it's a perfect age and you're so self-assured and you know so little It never you I never can show my hand And at one point a student said you know wikipedia is really improved with time You know I'm looking I said I'm kind of looking at your Demographic how old are you? I'm 21 I've seen tremendous gains in wikipedia and it's just like a great time in your life I don't know if you're ever that ridiculously confident and And in college kind of encourages the use of taking that kind of stand so what what I get to do is very fun so there is what we're hearing the focus groups now is that wikipedia has improved somehow and still however that professors don't think it's a good resource and But still students are drawn to it and probably my favorite reason for using wikipedia. It gives me the confidence That if somebody can write an entry Somebody a crowdsourced entry if you can have an entry. That's just a page long when you print it out It means I could get a paper out of it There it wouldn't be too long. So they're actually even sizing up the length of the wikipedia entry So that's probably the big picture context which makes perfect sense to have a summary tell me what I'm talking about What are the choices? We all do it. We all use wikipedia But it's interesting to see this weave into the course research process as something that's kind of happening beyond the classroom That's something that's not discussed the second is information gathering here and with information gathering we see that this comes up often and with information gathering What happens is again Almost like my first set of slides with a ratio analysis in the takeaways. This is a very different environment for college students and the story that we heard here was a Story I heard from a Harvard student was a junior. She said She was so articulate when she responded. I wrote her and said no, this isn't for professors This is for students. She said no actually I am a student. She had this beautiful English accent She showed up and her parents were both physicians and she grew up in New York and went to a prep school And I thought this is she's a total outlier here. This should be interesting and She told the following story. She said she had a policy class and they were doing a paper they were working in a team and She said and the professor had said you need to see Elsie blah blah blah blah and She I've told the story before because it captures the information gathering problem and she said Elsie in the library. So she trotted over to Lamont the undergrad library. She looked around it comes back There's a thread here and she thought there's no Elsie You know, they're not wearing name tags I wonder who Elsie is. I can't figure it out. And so I mean she really stressed about it And then with her group she said has anybody met Elsie? and They said, oh No, what are you looking for? She goes well, they said this resource and Elsie has it and Said no, that's the call number where well her high school had used to it And as she said, I mean, so if she said she's really Unruffled and said, oh, oh, oh now I understand that. I always went and saw Dewey not Elsie Okay, I got it and that that was her breakthrough moment and at that point they brought a librarian in the group did to their benefit and brought a librarian in to work with them on the research the students themselves realize that that mapping Didn't transfer from one environment to the next The next Context is language and again language if you really think about taking general lead it still takes years off me I also went to Berkeley as an undergrad where in the morning you'd have anthropology and you'd have a list okay ethnography is and you know, you'd go through that and then after your anthro class you'd have another course and The terms of the discipline Were so different that it was almost like you were taking four or five different language courses in foreign languages And this is a particular stumbling block for students What we found most recently in our studies is students don't get this and how this translates horribly is coming up with keywords Because if you don't understand language, it's impossible to come up with the keywords. This isn't the old days with the red Vine or the red leather two volumes of subject headings Where the librarian when I was an undergrad at Moffa would walk you over and Show you the subject headings and you would choose a subject heading and they'd say you can find anything in the card Here dough Moffat all of it and you thought I got this piece of paper This is what I need to be able to find my way around this campus and the web has undone that for us and To illustrate that point one student said to us in a focus group last month Now wait, I always forget is it keywords or buzzwords? Which is actually pretty well stated The last one and then you hear people in the focus group saying let me explain it to you Which is interesting in itself the last one is situational context Situational context is the surrounding circumstances Usually with course related research. That's great and that's also when it's due and Citation styles and don't plagiarize and in fact, that's what assignment handouts tend to promote To students because we've studied those as well But situational in everyday life is something that does come up and it really is that risk of verse for everyday life research one student from the Midwest was talking about canning ham and Said I went on the web and without saying this I looked for consensus about how to can a ham and She and he said ah Some of the information wasn't right. I mean it didn't add up. It wasn't the same solution And he said I went down to the county extension office and Figured that's where I'd get an answer because if I chose the wrong answer pause I could die and So the consequences of situation are interesting and they certainly extend beyond course related research Kind of move along here What we get are students that really do use a strategy. That's really based on predictability familiarity non exploration and More and more what we're finding in the focus groups that we're doing now efficiency Command F any shortcut they can come up with so here's Michael and Michael is not every student But he's a lot of students Michael is risk averse in other words. He plays it safe He often whether you call it the game as some students call it I know that it's a game and that instructor knows what they want and that's what I'm after or you call that the answer that really does Translate from high school The idea of what inquiry is is really unknown to a lot of different students Also, something that we found in the first-year study, which I found really concerning is really not understanding how libraries work in reference and If you stand in that line for reference as one first-year student told me, oh, no I said how can we don't go over to reference and she said oh, I can't do that Those are for special students. They get a special scholarship coming in. They're the ones that need the help So those resources are for them This whole idea of student preparedness and the fact that you're cut loose in college and you're throwing in with a bunch of students that have had Tremendously different opportunities or disadvantages than you have it is not an even playing field at all But this concern that you must appear self-sufficient and often students procrastinate What we've which but we've also looked into that It's what you it's nice to do repeat studies or to do an online study like this I mean an ongoing study But what we found is procrastinations actually changed a little bit based on what students tell us It's often because they're balancing work from their classes They're taking more classes to get through four years as costs go up and often whether your family has money or not You're working a couple of jobs to make ends meet This is not a reason for procrastination that research found in the social science 20 or 30 years ago that it really was a lack of confidence It's a different experience in other words what we find is that and I've mentioned some of these resources Students really do tread a well-worn path here They rely on course readings Which some people say course readings, but yes course readings is the map for situational Context of what the professor expects students have told us this year in the focus groups That's where you get the concepts that matter That's where you mention the concept in your paper if you want a better grade Now if you're a professor and you really for lack of a better word want to jack a student around What you do is you go into a class and say who did the reading and Then I did this inadvertently one time. I didn't think it was that good. What do you think? And but you chose it You can say but sometimes in scholarly communication. There's not the perfect reading even for me and That's what knowledge is it's evolving turned out to be a good lesson Also, we see the use of Google and Wikipedia Google scholars an interesting transition. This is maybe one of the biggest transitions students make in college is To jump from Google to Google scholar as a way to use a familiar as one student said a tab away resource That had a tab away from Google search That is familiar with to them that gets them the journal articles that their professors say that they need J stores up here. Somebody should ground like J store, but this is really what students We've heard say they go to most often and they often go because a professor recommends it Government sites of course a whole area and for this conference an area of continued discussion Government sites in particular are used in the social sciences for data and How that will change in the Trump administration should be interesting to research assignments and then instructors to close the loop and With instructors closing the loop what you do is it's the situational context You go back to the instructor and say am I on the right track? Before you turn in the paper Some students say I know they have the answer Somewhere in that office and they might hand me a book or they might hand me a special article and that's gold So it's an interesting hedging of bets Okay, my time is dwindling. So I'm going to move ahead through a couple of slides here Go to experts. This is an interesting comparison based on what we hear from students students go to instructors Professors are their research coaches. Not only are they the ones with the sanction of the grade They are the ones seen as having knowledge One student told me about librarians. She said God. I went to a librarian. They were really helpful and You never can show your hand. I said really and She's a first-year student. She said they knew so much. I mean it really helped on my paper And I said what was that like and she said well, you know, the best thing is she doesn't tell your professor You were here. This is kind of like a research therapist You come in here you can tell her your problems and they really help and then she paused This is your field and mine and then she paused and said Another great thing about this age. She said, you know They're kind of Altruistic and I said I bet you did really well on the SAT and verbals nailed it in a study that we did looking at handouts and The thing that is so problematic in seeing professors as your research coach We found that most professors in a hundred ninety one handouts that we analyzed from 29 different schools We found that most of them recommended for resources to use a place-based Resource a book in the library with one copy Now you can imagine say it's a lecture this big Somebody says they have to use a restroom They are racing to the library to get that book if you're going to buy the book It's not going to happen This is problematic in that relationship that thread between professors and librarians There have been some gains in this area where librarians at different institutions have worked With professors on really perfecting a good handout for an assignment probably one of the most important things is Include what inquiry is what you're asking students to do Only sixteen percent of the handouts we looked at did that the best one said pretend like you're Sherlock Holmes and You're going to find different facts and clues and you may have to go back and revisit them And this was a metaphor that was particularly represented of what the research process was like So all that being said and I'm hurrying along here I always think I don't have enough slides and I always have too many What happens over time is that students research processes do evolve and change this isn't all bad news They do experience improvements Some of these I've touched on the first year the aha moments We've found based on our research over nine studies and now the focus groups have been this transition from Google to Google Scholar I know that's not the best solution, but it shows some recognition of you need scholarly research and how to be able to assess that at the same time an aha moment for students a breakthrough was Abstracts or as one student said to me. It's quite a lovely thing those abstracts and then Hesitantly said they give a summary and you knew the bubble above her head was like but not Wikipedia That summaries aren't always bad that they are a way to be able to make important choices about the sources that you use And how far you look at different resources Once you have a major we found the citation trail, which is really a librarian term has come up quite a bit and Also evaluation criteria gets better as well as ethical issues of what? Pleasureism is or at least a recognition you need to cite information Somebody came up with that idea that you didn't come up with After college, this is important We did a lifelong learning study of recent grads that was funded by IMLS and Asked them in what their takeaway skills were what had they learned or developed during college in Classes or not or beyond the coral group and what did they apply or adapt in their lives now their post college lives And we found that those information processing skills were strong From their point of view they may have not been perfect But they felt that they had enough to work with and walked away as satisfied customers But what they didn't feel that they walked away with was the ability to ask and frame questions of their own Sure, they could ask a question about whether it was on the test or What a concept meant but they really didn't develop the process of asking questions about how it tied into areas that interested them as One student at a big public said you need to understand when we did follow-up interviews This is an institution that has a model of how to get me out in four years It's a model of efficiency I'm in a lecture hall with six hundred different students and that's been my experience here I'm not raising my hand and slowing that model down and it's a it's a pretty damning statement about How some students view that process and how they realize they need once they get a job to be able to ask questions What employers want and this is from the workplace study what employers want is a Skill that students have this ability to integrate information the gray Gray lettering at the top, but in the red is what students didn't have the recent grads. They had hired Probably most importantly. They didn't see research as a social process As something that was contextual Who does best here often nurses as one nurse said in focus groups we did on the workplace study You got to understand if somebody keeps if a group of people keeps coming in with a certain flu strain I'm not gonna find the answer on Google I'm gonna have to go to the supervising nurse and say have it's a pattern here I'm gonna have to look at the evidence and the context That's important. That's that's going around in my environment and this is where students lacked and Overall, maybe something that is pretty damning about how we teach research and how we educate our students And I'm glad to see is changing to a certain degree. It's this emphasis on print based resources Everything you can find is print and it's online and employers Totally dispute that and feel that the student that the grants they end up with may be able to find things online But it's really the context of the workplace Lastly there are promising changes coming around some of these key findings some of these are happening in Community colleges some of these are happening in large Public institutions we see a movement towards fewer lessons on search. There's an interesting piece in library with a lead pipe That has a piece that Marianne Deedering wrote with Hannah Rampsel about integrating Curiosity into teaching search Instead of asking to find something let students define what their interests are some of these fixes are Relatively easy. It's a way of rethinking how we're teaching and then secondly This effort to tie it all together is being taught more and more and this movement towards peer support whether that's peer-to-peer reference or UCLA has worked in the area of having Embedded students that are experts that they've worked with in classes that can help students on different research projects as An employee of the library in other words students are going to ask their peers It is like the YouTube example that I began with of I like when it's an MIT student That has talks about where students get stuck and then lastly what is working? Often people say I find you depressing. I'm not there are things It's usually public librarians There are things that are working and it's certainly Evaluation students really Go out and do a focus group in the post-truth era bias comes up about every ten minutes Some of these things are really sticking But I think the reason that they are is evaluation often starts in kindergarten. It starts at home It grows the demands for evaluation change as your education does you see it in your in the classroom But you also see it in the work that librarians do with students. I'll end on that note. Thank you