Librarians in the Midst: Improving Student Research Through Collaborative Instruction

ABSTRACT

We test whether and how well the presence of an embedded librarian improves the quality of student research. Students in introductory-level courses tend to have very low levels of research skills and experience. Though faculty are frustrated by this lack of skills, both students and faculty tend to have only a peripheral knowledge of the role librarians can play in helping develop their research skills. Studies suggest that embedding librarians into course instruction is the preferred method for improving students’ research skills, yet the political science teaching and learning literature rarely addresses this issue or focuses on single-class experiences, measuring change in student knowledge and skills from the beginning to the end of a semester. We compare two International Politics courses taught in consecutive fall semesters with different levels of librarian involvement in the class. We assess the changes in quality and the use of information sources in the final research papers, both from a bibliographic perspective (looking at the number, quality, and variety of sources used) as well as an information-use perspective (looking at the relevance of cited material in supporting arguments).

KEYWORDS:

• Information literacy
• embedded librarianship
• collaborative instruction

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 5, 2015, in San Francisco, California. We benefited from a fruitful discussion there and especially thank Arthur Sanders for his time and comments. We also thank Jeff Bernstein and Mary Lou Baker Jones, both of whom have made this a stronger and more readable article. Thanks to Graduate Assistant Rahimullah Akrami for his research and anonymization efforts.

Contributor

Amanda Shannon is the Coordinator of Library Instruction and Assessment at the Wright State University Libraries. She has an MA in political science (Ohio State University, 2001) and MSLS (Clarion University, 2011). Her primary areas of interest are the effective integration and assessment of information literacy in course content, demonstrating library value through assessment, and connecting information literacy instruction to university learning outcomes. She is the Chair of the Academic Library Association of Ohio's Assessment Interest Group.

Vaughn Shannon obtained his Ph.D. in political science at Ohio State University (2001). His main areas of teaching and research are international relations, international security, foreign policy analysis, and Middle East politics. He has published in numerous journals, including International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Security Studies, European Journal of International Relations, and Foreign Policy Analysis. He co-edited and contributed to Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2011). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Outreach Council and of the National Model United Nations Faculty Advisory Group. He is currently working on a project testing the effects of role-play simulation on knowledge and empathy of participants towards the Middle East countries they represent.

Notes

From Patrick Ness's acceptance speech for the 2011 Carnegie Medal, as quoted in The Guardian news coverage of the event (“Patrick Ness” 2011, para 19).

This interpretation is based on specific searches within political science pedagogy journals including PS and Journal of Political Science Education, as well as a federated search on the following terms: (“information literacy” or librar*) and “political science.”

There were no Ds or Fs in the two sets of papers, which would have been coded 1 or 0, respectively.

We ran the Grade variable against both authors’ initial rubric scores for transparency and found little appreciable difference: a .334 (significant at the .006 level) for Author 1, and a .378 (significant at the .002 level) for Author 2.