Library Instruction at Germanna

Library Instruction at Germanna

• Librarians at Germanna teach library instruction sessions intended to support the successful completion of course assignments and develop students' information literacy skill set.  Our sessions support the "Critical Thinking" general education competency.

• Library faculty assist teaching faculty in developing a college-level information literacy foundation for students in freshman composition courses. 

• Library instruction also supports information literacy skill development in any general education or program-level course with a research component.

• All library instruction sessions are interactive and require student participation.  

Learning Outcomes for Library Instruction

• In all library instruction sessions, librarians emphasize the concept of "research as a process" that has sequential steps, but is not a straight line, and usually involves circling back to earlier steps. This concept is a key to alleviating students' research-related anxiety, helping them to understand when they are making progress with their research, and improving their confidence in their research abilities.

• In a 30-50 minute class session, librarians focus on 3-4 of the following learning outcomes:

  • Outcome One (Identify Scholarly Articles and Explain Their Research Value):
    Students will be able to describe the characteristics of scholarly articles to identify them and explain their relevance to academic research.
    (Information Evaluation - Source Types - Scholarly Articles)

  • Outcome Two (Summarize Basic Standards of Scholarly Communication):
    Students will be able to describe the main norms and standards (e.g. peer-review) of the formal scholarly communication system academics use to share their research findings.
    (Scholarly Communication As a Formal System)

  • Outcome Three (Create Effective and Efficient Search Strategies in Library Databases):
    Students will be able to construct effective and efficient search strategies in library databases to retrieve topically relevant sources, and relevant source types, for a given research assignment.
    (Library Databases - Search Strategies - Topical Relevance & Source Type Relevance)

  • Outcome Four (Identify Reference Sources and Explain Their Research Value):
    Students will be able to describe the characteristics of reference sources to identify them and explain their relevance to academic research.
    (Information Evaluation - Source Types - Reference Sources)

  • Outcome Five (Apply Evaluative Criteria to Judge Source Credibility):
    Students will be able to apply a set of evaluative criteria to an outside source in order to gauge its credibility/reliability in the context of a specific information need.
    (Information Evaluation - Judging Source Credibility in Context)