Category: information literacy

Behind the Paywall: Re-Situating Information Poverty

Citation

Link to preprint at the Carolina Digital Repository

Amelia N. Gibson & John D. Martin III.  Re-Situating Information Poverty: Information Marginalization and Parents of Individuals with Disabilities.  JASIST. Preprint. February 11, 2019.  https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24128

Access Issues

Paywall: Wiley, accessed via Interlibrary Loan

ETA: There is a copy now available at the Carolina Digital Repository. Yay for authors’ rights!

Hoo boy.  So.  First, I couldn’t find this article in our discovery layer, most likely because it’s is an “early view” article and not yet in an official issue.  So I had to search on the journal and browse. But I hit a paywall even though my institutional credentials were showing up, and everything looked like I should have access.  Since I have been around long enough to remember the time when we cut our library science journals to keep from having to cut other fields’ journals, I suspected that that access was pretend, but you never know, things change in journal packages.  I reported the issue to the wonderful people in our E-resources department, who responded within the hour to let me know the real deal, and I placed an ILL request manually. I had the article in my possession within a half of a working day.

Stuff I needed to know to make this work: 1) multiple ways to query the discovery layer; 2) that the volume field in the ILL form will accept any info; 3) to use the Notes field on the ILL form to explain the access issue.

NOW. I feel like it is important to say here that I am not listing these access issues as evidence that we are not doing our jobs in my library.  These are all issues that are inherent to a landscape where you’re dealing with a bunch of different contracts, a bunch of different publishers with their own paywalls and platforms, bundles, consortial partnerships, and those are just one part of the complexity.  No library is going to be playing error-free ball in this information world; what matters is how quickly we are set up to help when these barriers emerge.

TL;DR

I loved loved this article. It applies a critical lens to the information practices of an important population with important needs (moms of children with Downs Syndrome or autism), and the additional theoretical work that the authors have done is sparking thinking about my practice that is super useful, both in an immediate and an extended sense.  Basically, this article uses Chatman’s 1996 model of information poverty, with a particular focus on the intentional, defensive behaviors (including secrecy and deception) that people experiencing information poverty use in risky information-seeking situations. The researchers identify both individual and community-based defensive behaviors and use this data to theorize beyond existing models, which keep their focus on individual behaviors. The authors present a theory of information marginalization, which considers the structural factors and context that create information poverty.

And here we go…

So, one thing off the top – there’s some really useful, clear, definitions in this piece:

  • Information inequity: “the idea that some people have greater difficulty finding, accessing, accepting or using information than others” (1)
  • Information poverty: “a persistent lack of information access as experienced by a group or individual, usually as a result of social factors, embodied by various types of information-related inequalities” (1) (Haider & Bawden, 2007; Yu, 2006)
  • Information marginalization: “the systematic, interactive socio-technical processes that can push and hold certain groups of people at social “margins,” where their needs are persistently ignored or overlooked.” (1)

We start by situating the argument, and this time – it’s within the research discourse on information behavior. Specifically, a reason people point to as moral justification for doing information behavior research in the first place is the existence of information inequity and information poverty.  Most of this research focuses on the behavior(s) of the individual experiencing that inequity or poverty. It doesn’t look at the institutional context, or the structures that create poverty.  “This article pivots away from a focus on the individual toward development of a theory of information marginalization.” (1)

Literature Review

The authors spend some time situating and summarizing a specific article  — Chatman (1996) — which is a key to understanding how information poverty works, and which pushed the existing discourse in its day to deal with the fact that information poverty reflects something deeper than that which can be fixed by simply adding more resources.

Six characteristics that people experiencing information poverty perceive (Chatman 1996):

  1. I lack information sources or access to them.
  2. I am at the lower end of existing class systems.
  3. I need to defensively protect myself when I have to seek info from potentially unsafe people.
  4. Secrecy or deception about my information need is fine if I need it to feel safe.
  5. I have to  weigh the risks of seeking info against the benefits of having it.
  6. I will selectively integrate new information to my info worldview

Now, as important as this particular article was, it didn’t really get into (and the literature it inspired didn’t get into) the structural factors in play.  Neither has the information science literature around disability.

And with that, we’re ready to more specifically name the problem(s) and questions. 

Themes: information access, information poverty, and structures of information marginalization.

Research focus: Mothers of people with Down syndrome and autism

Theoretical model and method: Critical Disability: approaching disability as something made up of individual differences AND socially constructed barriers. This study is built out of a “critical, constructivist grounded theory perspective”

“…we acknowledge that we ourselves (as researchers, educators, and in the case of the first author, as the mother of a child with a disability) are positioned within the social contexts described in this article. From the interview through the data analysis process, we acknowledge the research as being co-constructed between the researchers and the participants (Charmaz, 2014).” 

Research Questions:

  • How do participants describe their information practices and information seeking experiences? Do they fit Chatman’s theory?
  • “What contextual factors contribute to defensive info behaviors and knowledge practices as described by participants.? How can we theorize the relationship between contextual factors and information practices customarily described as indications of information poverty?”
  • “What are the implications of focusing primarily on improving contextual factors, rather than changing individual or community information practices?”

The information needs of this particular group of people are big and important, and also quite specific.  These needs differentiate them from other parents, and they also change situationally – as children age, from place to place, etc. 

A note on language: The authors also take a moment to discuss their use of language (people first language to refer to individuals, and identity-first language to refer to communities), and acknowledge that the language around disability is contested. They have chosen to use the language used by study participants, even when that doesn’t reflect current trends. 

So, let’s dig into the concept of information poverty

Overall, the literature in this area continues to reflect an “cultural deficit model” that compares what people deemed information poor DO against mainstream, institutional cultural standards that reflect mainstream, dominant assumptions and standards — white, male, heterosexual, U.S. based, English speaking, etc.

Basically, there are unexamined, uncritical assumptions embedded within this discourse — that there is a “right” way to access information, that there are “right” amounts and types of information, etc.   The value and effectiveness of those existing systems aren’t questioned — neither in general, nor for the specific population being examined.  This orientation extends to disability.

“This narrow focus on individual behaviors, rather than contextual preconditions for those behaviors also frees information science researchers from the obligation to understand how marginalization works. This, in turn, limits our ability to develop information systems (human, and machine) that reflect and respond to the needs of communities at the margins.”

Methods

Population: a “purposive, theoretically driven sample” (Charmaz, 2014) – 24 moms of individuals with Down Syndrome or autism.

Semi-structured interviews, based on the information horizons protocol (Sonnewald, Wildemuth & Harmon, 2001).

Data was coded individually. Researchers met weekly to compare codes, discuss emerging themes and discuss their way through coding conflicts.

Themes were identified using constant comparative analysis, but the researchers didn’t claim or try to start from a tabula rasa point.  Instead, Chatman’s theory provided a starting point for coding. Later rounds of coding focused on “identification of defensive, proactive, or coping behaviors and contextual factors that contributed to those behaviors” (4).

Results

Information marginalization factors were identified and grouped — four main clusters emerged.  For each of these clusters, the authors present a table that includes: 

  • The factor they have identified and named, broken down into specific dimensions.
  • The individual knowledge behaviors and/or defensive behaviors associated with that factor.
  • The community-level practices and/or defensive behaviors associated with that factor.
  • Examples of data that the researchers associated with that factor.

I’m not going to give you all of that information for each one, but if you’re interested and can track down the article, there is way more in here.

First cluster: Perceived information deficits

This included the perception that info couldn’t be trusted or was being withheld. This was especially important when it came to information about rights.

Defensive behaviors include (but are not limited to):

  • Individual behaviors like: seeking info from other parents instead of professionals; intentionally seeking information from inside or outside of the local community, depending on the situation; fighting or advocating; building strategic professional relationships; being visible and present.
  • Community behaviors like: Social media group development or participation; information seeking/distribution by organizations; being visible & active in the local non-disability community.

Second cluster: Class distinctions

This included a lack of access to info or resources because of the level of disability, information that requires a high level of reading skills or education to navigate; barriers put up by racial bias, economic factors, etc.

Defensive behaviors include:

  • Individual behaviors like: waiting/ hoping/ expressing disappointment; making judgments about personal infolit relative to other parents; uncertainty about paying for services; actively seeking racially diverse settings; hiring private consultants.
  • Community behaviors like: pooling resources; perceived variations in access to information (e.g. subject saying “things are okay for me, but wouldn’t be for others”)

Third cluster: Situational relevance assessment. 

Inadequate support for age (particularly the age of the child),  racial and gender subgroups. 

Defensive behaviors include: 

  • Individual behaviors like choosing friend/support group based on these same factors (e.g. age of child). 
  • Community behaviors: development of cliques or micro-communities.

Fourth cluster: Risk assessment/ Selective introduction of information

This section describes the behaviors parents engaged in to protect themselves from perceived threats (direct threats to children, or threats to the parents’ ability to find information) in their environment, and to increase their agency.

Defensive behaviors include:

  • Individual behaviors like: avoiding seeking info from institutions, or using their own, secret, rubric to evaluate what they hear. Emotions like feeling overloaded, feeling bullied.
  • Community behaviors like establishing a social norm of person to person info sharing.

Discussion

Basically, the specific things experienced by these specific individuals navigating these specific situations matter. And the behaviors they feel they need to engage in to navigate these situations safely also matter — to them, and to those of us who share a mission to get them the information they need to do that navigation.

Gibson and Martin, though, are making an argument that theorizes beyond these specifics to name a broader phenomenon: information marginalization. They look at the information behaviors that they observe and explain them not as errors but as rational responses (developed by individuals and by communities) to injustice.  This is really important. Re-framing these behaviors in this way reveals a whole different set of solutions to the problems that these mothers face:

“Although some time, energy, and resources should clearly be dedicated to ensuring that these mothers have the information seeking and literacy skills to successfully find desired information and make quality judgments, equal, if not more, emphasis should be placed on ensuring that the information systems they use are intentionally and thoughtfully designed so they do not prompt mothers to engage in defensive information practices in the first place.” (10)

And a whole different way of looking at our practice:

“If we acknowledge that what we call information poverty is often a result of systemic failure of information systems to meet the needs of marginalized groups of people, we must also acknowledge that the solution lies in the development and improvement of those systems, rather than existentialist statements about those groups of people. This might also demand reassessment of the field’s own constructions of relevance, quality, and authority, and centering of a diverse range of information values, rather than imposition of those currently embraced by the field.” (11)

Continue reading “Behind the Paywall: Re-Situating Information Poverty” →

I wrote a thing. Over there –>

I haven’t written here in a super long while.  But Hannah and I wrote a thing, published In that Library with the Lead Pipe place.

Sparking Curiosity — Librarians’ Role in Encouraging Exploration

Lots of you know this has been a long time coming — we first talked about it in public, I think, at Online Northwest in the 2014 Snowpocalypse.  I thought it might be fun to pull together all of the posts about it here:

Online Northwest 2014 (with Chad Iwertz)

(Which also led to the Curiosity Self Assessment Scoring Guide)

Library Instruction West 2014

Oregon Library Association Annual Conference 2016

LILAC 2016

European Conference on Information Literacy 2016

This work has also been a part of a lot of the professional development workshops I’ve taught, and Hannah and I have taught, in the last five years.  In fact, we’ll be teaching on this topic (and others) the day after tomorrow at Colorado Mountain College, and we’re very excited.

AMICAL 2015 — It Takes a Campus: Creating Research Assignments that Spark Curiosity and Collaboration.

University of San Francisco 2015 — Fostering Curiosity and Inquiry with First-Year Students

 

 

The problem with context

“Judging from what you all, say” remarked Aunt Jamesina, “the sum and substance is that you can learn—if you’ve got natural gumption enough—in four years at college what it would take about twenty years of living to teach you. Well, that justifies higher education in my opinion. It’s a matter I was always dubious about before.”

— Anne of the Island (Lucy Maud Montgomery)

Annbook cover with the image of a young man in a brown suit seated on a rock wall, looking at a red-haired woman who is looking away from him, with the title Anne of the Islande of the Island was always my favorite of the Green Gables books, not because (okay, not just because) it’s the one where Anne finally gets it together about Gilbert but also because it’s a college story. And I’ve had romantic fuzzy notions about college for pretty much my whole life. So because I’ve read and reread this book so many times over the years, I’ve been able to pull this quotation out to liven up a lot of reflective writing pieces about the value of education, college, training — you get the picture.

But I’ve been thinking about it lately from the other side. From the perspective of learning that can’t be shortcut, at least not entirely. I was scanning Twitter one day, and saw this tweet from Emily Drabinski, who was live-tweeting a talk about context and information literacy by Andrea Baer.

 

In my work, I end up talking a lot about evaluation and authentic evaluation. Especially to classroom faculty and teaching librarians. And so much of that is tied up with this idea of context. The tl;dr version is blah blah tools like evaluation checklists suggest that evaluation can be done with a close examination of the thing itself, out of any context, and that’s not how evaluation works. Evaluation is social and tied to how valuable a thing is seen in community, to the rhetorical situation and blah blah ….

Anyway, I’ve been churning on this tweet and my reaction to it for a while. I keep coming back to two relatively recent experiences with authentic evaluation in my own research.

Story 1

My colleague Hannah and I have been talking about curiosity in libraries in some different contexts for quite a while now. We’re trying to write up a piece of that this summer, which is always an interesting experience — to write up a piece of something that is still actively evolving. Both stories come out of this work; this is the more recent. And it’s probably the more typical when you think about why trying to contextualize your thinking in a new field, or why trying to contextualize a piece of information is hard.

So, the more we think about curiosity the more we think about affect. Curiosity and uncertainty can’t be separated — to be curious pretty much inherently means that there are things you don’t know. Not knowing stuff can be fun and exciting! But in terms of research assignments, which are perceived as (and which are for real) fairly high-stakes assignments in a course context, that not knowing can be less exciting than it is scary. So how to encourage students to try new things, use new sources, research unfamiliar topics when they have good reasons to be wary about doing so?

As we spend more time working directly with faculty on these questions, we’ve started to wonder what’s out there about risk taking, emotion and writing pedagogy?  At conferences people have suggested to us that fields like creative writing and creative arts might also be interesting places to look for more. And as I moved through these literatures I came across a creative writer with a huge body of work in writing pedagogy, who engages specifically with the idea of risk: Wendy Bishop.

Now before I started digging into Bishop’s (substantial) body of work, I started doing the additional digging I needed to do to contextualize it. On the one hand, this was a necessary step to understanding it myself. Her work is several years old now, and I don’t have the chronology of the debates in this field at my fingertips. I don’t think you can really understand work like hers without knowing what she was responding to, in her field and in the world. On the other hand, this is also a necessary step to evaluating the work, to put this back into the infolit context raised above.  Because this is a field I am working in, or at least alongside, I need to know how the community understands the work to predict how it will be perceived, questioned, critiqued and accepted before I can decide if and how I want to use it.  And I knew from this article, that the answers to those questions might be complicated.

Rhet/Comp is a field I know a little about, not a lot.  And what knowledge I do have is uneven and idiosyncratically collected, heavily influenced by wonderful people I’ve worked with and know. Still, I didn’t have to start from scratch this time!  So I knew what to ask, I knew some things to look for, and I knew some of the complicating factors.  Long story a little less long — it’s almost 3 weeks later and I’m still working on building this contextual understanding. And this is something I know how to do.

I can use information tools I already know how to use to do it.  I can use reading and thinking and organizing skills I already have to do it well. I am spending most of my time in genres I understand and know how to read. I have a working knowledge of many of the theories in play, and I know how to find out more about those that are less familiar. I can pull books I’ve already read off my shelf. I can call on people who know this scholarship (and who knew this scholar) and just ask my questions.  Okay fine, I also have a full time job and other projects — but that’s pretty much my main barrier. Mostly, making sense of a new context or conversation is something that just takes a lot of work — even after the How and Why learning curve is behind you.

Story 2

Now, this contrasts a lot with this earlier experience with a new body of literature — which in many ways was the thing that sent us in this direction in the first place.  When Hannah and I first started working on curiosity and poking around to see what was there, we did so in a very interdisciplinary, broad-net kind of way.  We found curiosity talked about a little, but not a lot, in many fields. We found lots of definitions of curiosity. We found it talked about in ways both similar and distinct in conversations that didn’t seem to intersect. And most of these mentions, and conversations, studies and definitions neither grew out of nor directly applied to our higher or adult education context.

In this exploring, we came across the work of an educational psychologist named Jordan Litman. It wasn’t hard to place his work in its disciplinary context which, to be honest, wasn’t a context we were super interested in. Litman is interested in curiosity as a personality trait. He and his partners develop and validate instruments to measure different types of curiosity, the data from which can then be analyzed next to data measuring other types of traits, states and behaviors.

There is a huge body of discussion around the very idea of personality traits. And honestly, we didn’t want to get into that. Our interest was sparked by this research because it made us think about curiosity, and how curiosity plays out in research assignments, in new and different ways. It helped us see past our own assumptions and our own experience to consider a way of seeing and knowing the issue that we’d been blind to before. On that level, it didn’t really matter if Litman’s approach was the best, if his work was highly respected or marginalized, or if it was basically ignored within his community.  And even there, trying to navigate between the “marginalized because of quality and marginalized because of a less hip topic” possibilities didn’t seem worth it or necessary. Whether these curiosity types behaved just as the research said they did didn’t really matter.  For our purposes, the idea that curiosity can be sparked in many and varied ways was the important thing — much more important than whether or not curiosity types can be definable or measurable or predictable. And so we decided not to do the weeks of background context-building that it would have taken to really understand this work as it was being used by the researcher.

It’s a liberating feeling to decide not to do this — to decide that “this thing is valuable because it’s useful to me.” Being able to do this, however, also means climbing that How and Why contexualization learning curve. It comes from knowing what questions might be asked, and knowing how to justify our choices in our context. And it comes from a position of privilege and control over our practice, and from knowing our expertise is respected by those who share this work with us.

So what?

These cases look different on the surface, but in both we’re drawing on some similar things.  Both of us bring years of experience to this work, experience developed in different disciplines and different professional communities.  Hundreds of papers, presentations, proposals and posters, directed at different audiences and for different purposes, helped us figure out what we need to know to communicate well. We’ve learned — through trial and error, by applying effort and feedback — what we need to know to understand context.

When I was first starting out as a librarian more than ten years ago, I came across the Harvard Writing Project. One of the conclusions of that study that has stuck with me ever since was that feedback — delivered early and often and from many perspectives — was essential for students to learn to write and think. And of course, because students come to college already knowing how to write and think, we know that what this and other studies are really saying is that opportunities to write and get feedback early and often are essential to learning how to write and think in this new and unfamiliar academic context.  

And in the years since, this has been borne out over and over: students who get the chance to write and create for different audiences, with helpful feedback, do just fine. They develop processes for writing, researching, thinking, and organizing that are useful (and well-used).  They figure it out. They learn what they need to know to get the work done by doing the work.

I was talking to a colleague in Comp recently about some topic coming down from administration  — hybrid classes, or maybe Adaptive Learning —  and he said (and I’m paraphrasing) “you know, we know what works.  Small classes, lots of feedback, and lots of opportunities to write different types of things for different types of audiences.  And it seems like all of these things we’re asked to study and adopt and add to the curriculum are just trying to find ways we can avoid investing in that thing we know works.”

We do know what works, but it’s expensive. And this all makes me worry about information literacy instruction. Ironically, not so much about the tools demos as the beyond-the-tools conceptual pieces that we talk about when we talk about infolit. I worry that when I talk about evaluation in a one-shot, I’m inevitably complicit in suggesting that there are generic, context-free ways to do the kind of thinking that we associate with evaluation or creation.  I worry when I argue for context and for teaching these things authentically I am setting up my colleagues to feel inadequate or less than the kind of learning that only experience, and repeated, meaningful experience can enable.  And most of all, at the end of the day, I worry that we’re supporting the institution in an effort to successfully create a world where they can measure “gains” in learning in research and writing and critical thinking without investing in the infrastructure and faculty needed to give students the repeated and meaningful experiences that help people really learn how to do these these things in context, no matter how that context changes.

Which all seems to point to Aunt Jamesina being wrong – that college or college-like experiences can’t substitute for experience.  But that’s not it at all.  I’m not talking about sink or swim, throwing students in at the deep end to see if they can figure it out when I say they need lots and lots of chances to figure it out.  I still think there is a lot we can do to create structured, supported experiences. A lot we can do to reveal the unwritten expectations of the culture and context that new college students need to understand. A lot we can do to encourage the metathinking needed to make sense of those experiences.

And I think that doing so in a way that reveals academic writing as communicating in a rhetorical situation that is culturally specific and not universal – is helpful to people who will have to navigate many such situations in their lives. But I’ll admit, I can’t wrap my head around where to start with the kind of work it takes to meaningfully contextualize in the one-shot, in the LibGuide, in the tutorial. And my brain shies away from the problem altogether. Which may be something to work on.

Again with curiosity (Library Instruction West 2014)

So, not only was this conference in Portland but it was also awesome.  Thanks one more time to Joan Petit, Sara Thompson, and the rest of the conference committee who put on such a great event.

Marijuana Legalization Papers Got You Down?  You Won’t Believe What We Did About It!

Hannah Gascho Rempel & Anne-Marie Deitering (OSU Libraries & Press)

Title slide for a presentation. The word curiosity is displayed across the top. Several images of sparks are below.

Download the slides (PDF)

Download the slides + presenter notes (PDF)

Session handout

Take the Curiosity Self Assessment

Scoring Guide to the Curiosity Self Assessment

 

thoughts about learning sparked by that note taking study

Remember a couple of weeks ago when news articles like this, or this or this were all over your social media?  Mine too.  I’m a little late to replying, but I didn’t want to do it until I’d read the actual study.  I read a couple of the news articles and something about the coverage was bugging me.  Me, an avowed taking-notes-by-hand-notetaker!  

Today, I read it, and I think I know what’s been bugging me.  It’s that when we didn’t have the tools that make things easy, we learned a lot, so the tools are bad narrative.

In other words, the technology (in this case, a pen) puts up a barrier, and what we have to do to get around that barrier turns out to be a useful learning experience.  We learn new skills because we’re motivated to get around the barrier, and we don’t even really notice we’re learning them because we have our eyes on the prize.

So when a new technology comes that removes the barrier we love it and adopt it, but worry about everyone who isn’t going have the important experience of getting over the barrier.  Or worse, we look at those who grew up without the barrier and decide that they’re deficient in some way.

Does this sound familiar?  Of course it does.  How many times have we heard variations of it in libraries?  A million?  A zillion?

The problem with ____________ is that students don’t learn how to _____________ anymore.

First, a quick recap of the study

(I crack myself up, it won’t be all that quick)

Context:  There are 2 main theories about the value of notetaking that were considered here:

  • External storage — this is the idea that notes give you something to study later.
  • Encoding — this is the idea that the cognitive work you do to turn information into notes improves your learning, even if you don’t review them again.

Since laptops enable a more transcription-like type of  notetaking, the authors hypothesize that they will find benefits to pen-and-paper notetaking over laptop-supported notetaking and they designed 3 related studies to test that:

Study 1 — let’s compare laptop notetaking to paper notetaking, without doing much else.

2 groups of students were asked to take notes on the same material, with no instruction on how to take notes.  They were randomly assigned laptops or pen/paper to do the task. Afterwards, they answered both factual/recall and conceptual/application questions about the material.  In addition, their notes were coded and analyzed by the researchers.

Both groups of students did about the same on the factual/recall questions, but the students who took notes by hand did significantly better on the conceptual/application questions.

Those who took notes in longhand wrote fewer words, and had fewer examples of direct transcription in their notes.

Study 2 — let’s do pretty much the same thing, but this time we’ll tell them not to transcribe.

So this time the students essentially did the same thing, but the students who got laptops were split into two groups.  One of those were told to take notes as they usually do, the other was also told that studies show transcription doesn’t work, and that they shouldn’t transcribe.

In this case, the differences between the groups were less significant, but the handwritten notes group still did better.  There was no difference in the laptop groups — inserting a paragraph telling students “don’t transcribe” didn’t have an effect.

Study 3 — this time, we’ll have them study the notes again later.

Instead of TED talks, four prose paragraphs were selected and then read by a grad student from a teleprompter to simulate a lecture. The paragraphs included 2 “seductive details” — information that is interesting but not useful. Students were told they’d be tested later before they took their notes.  Again, some were given laptops and some were given pen and paper.  A week later they came back, half were given the chance to study their notes for 10 minutes, half weren’t.

The results here were more complicated.  You have to look at the intersection between notetaking medium and study time to find significant differences.  Those who took longhand notes and studied did better than any other group of conditions. Additionally, among those who studied, verbatim notetaking and transcription negatively affected performance.

Okay, enough recap, on to my thoughts:

(For more details about the study — see the end of the post. It’s paywalled, so I’m feeling responsible for making sure you have the details the news articles don’t include)

I want to start off by saying that I don’t have a problem with this study – I think it’s useful, I think it’s interesting, and I am fairly certain I will come back to it again and use it in real life.  My issue is with the conclusions that have been drawn from it — mostly in all of those news stories, but also by most of the people who tweeted, facebooked or tumblr-ed those articles.

Reading the actual study – there’s nothing in there that says much about the medium.  Beyond the fact that most people type faster than they write, and therefore can get closer to transcription on a laptop, there’s really nothing at all.  What the study found was that if you transcribe, you don’t learn as well and, as they point out themselves, we knew that already.

See, I don’t think the takeaway is “don’t take notes with laptops.”  I think the takeaway is — we have to start teaching people how to take notes. Better yet, we have to start teaching people how to use the information they gain from lectures, videos, infographics, textbooks, readings and learning objects.

There’s definitely no way one could consider the Just Say No to Transcription intervention in Study #2 “teaching” — this study surely did not prove that people can’t take good notes with laptops, it only suggested that they don’t.

There’s nothing magical about taking notes by hand that makes people process and think and be cognitively aware of what they’re doing — if that’s all you have and you want  good notes, over time you will figure that out because you can’t write fast enough to transcribe.  But that’s not magic, it’s motivation.  It’s still a learned behavior, even if the teacher could remain blissfully unaware of that learning.

And when we learned how subject headings worked, or that we could find more sources by using the bibliography at the end of the book, or that the whole section where that one book was had interesting stuff, or that both the article title and the journal title were important — learning that stuff wasn’t the point and we might not have noticed that learning.  But we learned how to think like the people who organized and used the information because learning that was the fastest and easiest way to getting our papers done.

(Hey, do you think that when copy machines were invented, and we could just make a copy of the article instead of having to read, digest and take notes on it in the library people argued for No Copy Machines?)

Even if we take laptops out of the classroom, I don’t think that students will feel like they have to learn how to think about, digest, remix and capture their thoughts about a lecture in order to function.  I think that ship has probably sailed, that horse is out of the barn, that genie’s out of the bottle.

If a student knows they can record the lectures on their phone, or if the slidedeck and lecture notes are posted before every class, they’re not going to feel like they have to get it down or risk failure.  And if the lectures are already recorded and re-watchable in a flipped or online class — they’re not going to suddenly think they need to be flexing their best cognitive muscles because they have a pen in their hand.

I don’t hear the “put the barriers back up” when it comes to digital information from instruction librarians much anymore.  And I think it’s fair to say that I’m hearing it less from faculty too.  But I still worry when I see things like the coverage of this study — because it’s not like I disagree that things are getting lost when these barriers come down.  Skill type things, tacit knowledge type things and also habits of mind type things — the tools I had to work with as a young learner left me with a lot that still serves me well now, when I have better tools. If my students can’t learn those things the way I did – and they can’t — how will they?  I don’t think answers like “ban laptops,” or “just use a pen” are going to get them what they need.

Study details

Mueller, P.A. & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science.  doi:10.1177/0956797614524581 Study 1

  • Princeton students.  n=67 (33 men, 33 women & 1 other).
  • Laptops had no internet connection.
  • Students watched 3 TED talks and took notes.  No instruction on taking notes.
  • Taken to another room to provide data:
    • complete 2 distractor tasks
    • complete 1 taxing working memory task
    • answer factual/recall questions
    • answer conceptual/application questions
    • provide demographic data
  • Notes were coded and analyzed.
  • Results:
    • factual/recall = both groups the same
    • conceptual/application = laptops significantly worse
    • more notes = positive predictor
    • less verbatim notes = positive predictor

Study 2

  • UCLA students
  • Laptop groups = 1 control (take notes as you normally would), 1 intervention – studies show that students who take notes verbatim don’t do as well on tests. Don’t do that.
  • Data:
    • Complete a typing test
    • Complete the Need for Cognition Scale
    • Complete Academic self-efficacy scales
    • Complete a shorter version of the reading span task
    • Complete the same dependent measures (questions) as study 1.
    • Demographic data
    • Notes were coded and analyzed
  • Longhand students did better, but not significantly.
  • None of the other measures had an effect
  • Longhand students took fewer notes than any of the laptop groups and took fewer verbatim notes.
  • Telling people not to take notes verbatim had no effect.

Study 3

  • UCLA students
  • 4 prose passages were read from a teleprompter by a grad student standing at a lectern simulating a lecture.
  • Students saw the lectures in big groups, wearing headphones
  • 2 “seductive details” — interesting, but not important information — were inserted into the prose passages.
  • Students were told they would be tested on the material before taking notes.
  • Tests were 1 week later.
  • Study group was given 10 minutes to study notes in advance of taking the tests.
  • Data:
    • 40 questions, 10 per lecture, 2 in each of five categories:  seductive details, concepts, facts, inferences, applications
    • notes were analyzed
  • No main effects of note taking medium or chance to study.
  • Significant interaction between note taking medium and chance to study.
  • Longhand notes + study = significantly better than any other condition.
  • For those who studied, verbatim negatively predicted performance.

Images

The new way of taking lecture notes. Some rights reserved by Natalie Downe (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliedowne/1558297/

reading my notes. Some rights reserved by gordonr (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/gordonr/430546423/

pen. Some rights reserved by Walwyn (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/overton_cat/2267349191/

Copycard. Some rights reserved by reedinglessons (flickr). https://www.flickr.com/photos/reedinglessons/5909073392/

Sailboat. Some rights reserved by jordaneileenlucas (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jordanlucas/4027830675/

What? So What? Now What?

So I was at the First-Year Experience conference in San Diego a couple of weeks ago.  There were many highlights — starting with a conference that is actually in my time zone, to my excellent walking commute —

View of the Little Italy sign in San Diego, California
Walking commute from Little Italy to the conference hotel

— to the views from the conference hotel.

View towards the harbor from the Manchester Grant Hyatt in San Diego
trust me, this wasn’t even one of the best ones

Another highlight came in a late session by Catherine Sale Green and Kevin Clarke from the University 101 program at the University of South Carolina.  I wasn’t the only OSU person at this conference (far from it).  After I got back to campus, I was helping Ruth, who coordinates our FYE, with an info session for faculty thinking of applying to teach FYS next year and she started to say “what? so what….” and I finished with “now what” – because while it was a content-rich session, that short phrase was probably the most memorable part of it.

What?

It’s a guide to help students with reflective writing. Three simple questions to answer.

So what?

It probably won’t shock anyone to know that I find reflective writing pretty easy. It’s a reason this blog exists, and definitely a reason for the tagline. While the actual writing of some reflective documents (teaching philosophies, anyone?) kills me as dead as anyone, the how and the why of reflective writing has never been difficult for me.

Honestly, when I realized that it doesn’t come easily for every one (or even for most people) I started to feel more than a little narcissistic.  I realized that pretty quickly once I started teaching — I’d assign the kinds of reflective writing prompts I used to see in classes, and I’d get back papers where the students really struggled with trying to figure out the right answers, or what I wanted to hear, but that lacked any real reflection of their own thinking.  The problem is, when you’ve never had to (ahem) reflect on how to do something or why to do it — it’s super hard to figure out how to help people who are struggling.

What I like about these three questions is how they start with something relatively simple — description is usually straightforward — what happened, what did you do, what did you notice, what did you learn, and so forth.  But they don’t let students end there.  They push to more complex analysis — why does that thing matter?  And then they push beyond that to something equally challenging (what does it mean for you) that, if students do it successfully, will also demonstrate the value of reflection or metathinking itself.

Now what?

(Wikimedia Commons)

Well, here’s the thing – I will undoubtedly teach credit courses again and when I do I will undoubtedly assign reflective writing.  So this is going to help me there, in its intended context I have no doubt

But I also think this is a fantastic way to think about the process of analyzing and evaluating information.  We all know I don’t like checklists when it comes to teaching evaluating.  Truthfully, I’ll argue against any tool that tries to make a complex thing like evaluation simple (seriously – it’s at the top of some versions of Bloom’s! The top!)

And I’ll argue against any tool or trick that suggests you can evaluate all types of information the same way without context and without… yes… reflection, on your own needs, your own message, and your own rhetorical situation.  That’s my problem with checklists.  At best, they are useful tools to help you describe a thing.

An example — the checklist asks, “who’s the author?”  The student answers – William Ripple.  That’s descriptive, nothing more.  But think about it with all three questions.

Some rights reserved by Gouldy99 (flickr)

What?  The author of this article is William Ripple.

So what? Pushed to answer this question – the student will have to do some additional research.  They will find that William Ripple is on the faculty of OSU’s College of Forestry, and the director of the Trophic Cascades program.  He has conducted original research and authored or co-authored dozens of articles examining the role of large predators in ecological communities.

Now what? This question pushes the student to consider their own needs — what they’re trying to say, who they’re trying to convince and what type of evidence that audience will find convincing.

Now, move away from that fairly obvious checklist item and let’s consider a more complicated one, bias.

I’ve linked here before to this old but still excellent post explaining why identifying bias is not evaluation.  And yet, we all know that this is still where a lot of students are in their analysis — they want facts, bias is a reason to reject a source. But bias is no different than author – identifying it, being able to describe it, that’s not evaluation.

What?  I actually think this one could be a step forward in itself — instead of just saying a source is biased, a good answer will specify what that bias is, and what the evidence for it is.

So what? This could push a student to consider how that bias affects the message/argument/ validity of the piece.

Now what? And this is the real benefit — what does this mean for me? How does this bias affect my use of the source, how will my audience read it, how might it help me/ hinder me as I communicate my message?

Now, of course, a student could answer the questions “this source is biased, that matters because I need facts, so I will throw it out and look for something that says what I already believe.”  That could still happen.  And probably will sometimes.  But I like the idea of teaching evaluation as a reflective process, grounded in a rigorous description and examination of a source.

FYE Conference – notes and links

ETA – Presentation slides (they’re image heavy, and only moderately helpful, but here they are)

Information Literacy

Learning the Ropes: How Freshmen Conduct Course Research Once they Enter College. Alison Head/ Project Information Literacy. December 2013. (PDF)

The Citation Project Pilot study. Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tanya K. Rodrigue, and Tricia C. Serviss. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing and Pedagogy 2.2 (Fall 2010): 177-192.

Rempel, H. G., Buck, S., & Deitering, A. M. (2013). Examining Student Research Choices and Processes in a Disintermediated Searching Environment. portal: Libraries and the Academy. 13(4), 363-384.

Kim, K. S., & Sin, S. C. J. (2007). Perception and selection of information sources by undergraduate students: effects of avoidant style, confidence, and personal control in problem-solving.The Journal of Academic Librarianship. 33(6), 655-665. (Elsevier paywall)

Curiosity

Curiosity Self-Assessment  – try it yourself!

Scoring Guide

Based on:
by Jordan A. Litman & Mark V. Pezzo (2007). In Personality and Individual Differences 43 (6): 1448–1459.
by Jordan A. Litman & Charles D. Spielberger (2003) in Journal of Personality Assessment 80 (1) (February): 75–86.
by Robert P. Collins, Jordan A. Litman & Charles D. Speilberger (2004) in Personality and Individual Differences 36 (5): 1127-1141

Exploration

What we used in FYC:

WR 121 LibGuide

Science Daily

EurekAlert!

Twitter (for example: @HarvardResearch, @ResearchBlogs, @ResearchOSU)

Creating an embeddable twitter timeline (we are using the List Timeline option)

Mapping OSU Research – Google map

7 Ways to Make a Google Map Using Google Spreadsheets.  Note: ours is made by hand right now – but there might be interest in these options.

Other possibilities:

Newsmap — treemap style visualization of Google News.

Tiki-Toki — timeline generator

TimelineJS (integrated with Google Spreadsheets)

Good Library Assignments – The Outcome

So remember when I said that the 3-part Good Library Assignments brain dump was in preparation of a workshop? That was true.

And I’ve done the workshop a few times now and I’ve completed the accompanying materials.  Both of these are (obviously) intended for a faculty-librarian audience and both are entirely shareable.

There’s a LibGuide.  This was created as the “further reading” site for the workshop. It includes that information, as well as the slides and a transcript from the actual presentation.

Effective Research Assignments – LibGuide

There’s also a WordPress site where you can find sample assignments. Many of these are from Catherine Pellegrino and the awesome people at Saint Mary’s College.

Sample Assignments

Shameless begging – if you know of/ have used an activity or assignment that reflects these principles, would you share it?  I’ll totally be your best friend.

Curiosity, Browsing & Online Environments – Further Reading

UPDATE:  And just as I went to hit post – the email came that the conference is canceled.  Oh well.  I’m posting anyway because this topic isn’t going away.

*********************************

These are further reading/ exploration resources to go along with a talk that is supposed to happen at Online Northwest tomorrow.  If I sound less than confident, it is because this is the view from my front door.

view from my porch is snow
view from my porch

I live a 10 minute walk from the conference venue, and this is western Oregon, and we don’t really do snow.

I hope my doubts are misplaced, because this is routinely one of my favorite conferences and even though I am being denied the opportunity to hear some good friends speak by poor scheduling luck, I was really looking forward to the keynote.  I saw on the twitter that Andromeda won’t be able to get here, though, so things are not looking up.

In the interest of optimism, though, here’s the stuff behind this talk:

Hannah Gascho Rempel, Chad Iwertz & Anne-Marie Deitering.  Harnessing the Web to Create an Environment that Supports Curiosity, Exploration and Learning.  Online Northwest, 7 February 2014.

Curiosity

Curiosity Self-Assessment  – try it yourself!

Based on:
by Jordan A. Litman & Mark V. Pezzo (2007). In Personality and Individual Differences 43 (6): 1448–1459.
by Jordan A. Litman & Charles D. Spielberger (2003) in Journal of Personality Assessment 80 (1) (February): 75–86.

by Robert P. Collins, Jordan A. Litman & Charles D. Speilberger (2004) in Personality and Individual Differences 36 (5): 1127-1141

Exploration

What we used in FYC:

WR 121 LibGuide

Science Daily

EurekAlert!

Twitter (for example: @HarvardResearch, @ResearchBlogs, @ResearchOSU)

Creating an embeddable twitter timeline (we are using the List Timeline option)

Mapping OSU Research – Google map

7 Ways to Make a Google Map Using Google Spreadsheets.  Note: ours is made by hand right now – but there might be interest in these options.

Other possibilities:

Newsmap — treemap style visualization of Google News.

Tiki-Toki — timeline generator

TimelineJS (integrated with Google Spreadsheets)

From the archives: control freaks

I was remiss in suggesting that the content from Command-f might be gone – Caleb would not let that happen.

This post, however, is one that I have actually gone back to a number of times.  Mostly because I am lazy and it was an easy way to get back to the journal article I was discussing.

But also because of all of the thinking and reading I’ve done over the years about anxiety and affect and how they play into the research process – in a pretty real way, that thinking started here.

Control Freaks

August 7, 2008 – 12:11 am by anne-marie

So I want to confess something about this paper I wrote in college.

See, I took this Constitutional Law class in the PoliSci department.  We had to analyze a hypothetical Supreme Court case and write up a legal opinion just like we were Justices.  For this class we used an actual law school Con Law casebook for our textbook – and most of the pieces of the hypothetical situation we were supposed to rule on in this paper we could argue from the cases included in the book.  Most, but not all.

Students treated it as kind of a weed-out course for pre-law types.  With a zillion law schools out there, it couldn’t actually weed anyone out but it was still all very Paper Chase.  So there was some self-imposed pressure to do well on this paper to keep your dream of working 80 hour weeks to make partner alive.

So here’s my confession.  I can totally think like a lawyer.  I got an A- on that paper — but that’s not the confession part.

The confession part is that I wrote the whole thing without ever going to the library.  My 20-page argument was entirely based on what I could get out of the casebook.  And the reason I’m telling you about the A- is this:  I totally, obviously, knew better. I knew that parts 1 and 3 were solid and that walking the four blocks to the law school was the only way I could possibly get what I needed to un-twist the tortured logic of part 2 and still, I wouldn’t go.

So what’s the point of this?  The point is that I’ve been hearing a little flurry lately of “how do we get these kids, these kids today, to use all the awesome stuff we have for them” conversations and I’ve been thinking about how it’s all so very complicated.  Way more complicated than “they want fast, they want easy, they’re Millennials dontcha know.”  It’s about so much more than technology – it’s about the discourse, and the scope and query, and even about affect or emotion.

Which is what I want to talk about a little bit today – that affective, emotional piece.  I think we librarians sometimes show a tendency to assume that our users actively don’t want to use the library, don’t want to talk to us, don’t want to use our stuff.  If we’re in a bad mood, we might assume that they’re deliberately voting thumbs down on us.  If we’re in a better mood, we thnk more that they just don’t know – don’t know what’s available, don’t know how to use it, don’t know why they should use it, don’t know how to recognize it.

I think it’s worth remembering that sometimes it’s not about us — not that that means there’s nothing we can, or should, do about it.  At root, though, not about us.

There’s an article from a few months ago – in the Journal of Academic Librarianship* – looking at how some of these emotional, affective factors relate to how students perceive and use information sources.  It considers how students feel about themselves and their problem-solving — how well they do it, if they like to do it.  And even beyond that – how they understand their ability TO solve problems – if they feel in control of their feelings about it and their behaviors.

So, what did they find?

Confidence is key — confidence connects to users’ perceptions about the quality of information sources, how comprehensive, useful or even interesting they think the sources are.  Basically, users who don’t feel confident in their own problem-solving abilities are more likely to perceive a source as boring, sketchy, or not useful.  They are more likely to perceive a tool like a library catalog or database as useless than their peers with higher confidence levels do.

The researchers also examined how these students perceived their own willingness to engage in problem-solving in the first place  This factor – the approach/avoidance style – turns out to relate to how accessible students perceive information sources to be.  Users with high avoidance, who avoid problem-solving activities, perceive inforamtion sources as less accessible than their peers with low avoidance.  Isn’t that interesting?

In other words, approaching this from the perspective of “how do we get them to use our stuff,” it’d be really easy to write these students off as the worst stereotype of millennials or net gens.  After all, it’s true that these students probably don’t have great things to say about our stuff — if they lack confidence, they doubt journal articles and criticize library catalogs.  If they are highly avoidant, then they think our stuff is really hard to get.

And they probably say so.  If they talk to us at all, they probably tell us that the journal article is no good because it’s not about the pros AND the cons of gun control.  They probably tell us that the database has nothing on their topic.  But the interesting thing about this research is — that these affective characteristics apply to way more than just library stuff.  On that emotional level, these students aren’t drawing a “library stuff bad/ internet stuff good” distinction.

Students who lack confidence are also more likely to be skeptical of web sources, and they are more likely to have problems with how search engines work.  Highly avoidant students even characterize information from friends and family (friends and family!) as less accessible than their low-avoidance peers do.  It’s about them, not us – except to the extent that understanding them will help us reach/teach them.

So that’s all fascinating to think about, but the factor I found the most interesting was the users’ perception their own control.  This was the only factor that significantly affected how a student chose their sources.  The more out of control a student feels, the more likely they are to choose sources based on how easy those sources are to use, or how familiar those sources are.  “Accuracy” comes down below “easy” and “familiar” to these users.

Now this is a little bit about us, in that classic library anxiety way – if the environment is unfamliliar or intimidating (virtual or face to face) the user will tend to favor what they are familiar with before trying something new.  But it’s a slightly different way of thinking about it – at least of thinking about the solution.  Instead of thinking of ways to make the library friendlier, or the librarians more approachable or accessible, or the online interfaces more google-like and familiar, this way of thinking about the question suggests that we should be thinking of ways to put the users back in control.  To let them define their own questions, their own stories and their own interactions.

But it goes beyond library anxiety as well, because a user can feel out of control of the situation, even when the do know what it is they need to do, and even how to do it.  This is especially significant for students, I think, who ARE out of control when it comes to a lot of their information needs.  They don’t have control over their tasks, their timelines or even their conditions for success.

And its not just students.  Lots of people who come to us with information needs are out of control of something in their lives – they have problems, they need information – at that moment they are almost inherently out of control of something.  The search for information is in itself a desire to assert some control over whatever that problem-solving situation is.

This control question made me think of another study, one that Kate and I used to better understand some pieces of the virtual or IM reference transaction.**  In this study, the researchers found that flexible forms of communication that can be both synchronous or asynchronous are attractive to teens when they are trying to talk about emotional topics because they allow the teens to assert a lot of control.  They can control the pace and duration of the conversation, and even the identity they choose to present within the conversation.

I have no idea if this research really applies to IM reference – which usually isn’t all that emotional – but I think there’s a good chance that it does.  It seems logical to me that library users, feeling out of control and vulnerable because there is information they lack, would be attracted to a communication style that allows them to assert some control over how they get help?  I find this just as plausible than the more common interpretation I hear, that they choose IM because they’re in a hurry and they have no time and they want someone to just give them the information they want.

Not that I would have IM’ed those librarians at the law library at Penn.  I totally knew how to use the systems, and where the stuff I needed was in the building.  But back in the 1980’s, there was a definite sense that the law school did not really want the undergraduates anywhere near their library.  They had restricted hours, they had a we’re only letting you in at all because we have to attitude.  And asserting some control over my own process, I decided not to deal with that.  So yes, some of that emotional, affective response I had had something to do with the library.

But some did not.  Some was about taking control of: my timeline, my scope, the amount of energy I spent and how I balanced that project with all the others.  Some was about taking control of the project – I was most interested in part 3, and wanted to spend my time there.  And on some level, it was taking control of the outcome – defining my own conditions for success.

Which is where these two studies, and these ideas, connect in my head. On the one hand, the idea that it’s not about me or about my library.  That sometimes our users are dealing with a lot of stuff that has nothing directly to do with us – so there’s no need to take their frustration personally.  On the other hand, that we can do some things to let our users control their stories, their questions, and their interactions with us and with our resources.  And in so doing, alleviate some of those frustrations.  Here I’m fuzzy on the details, yes.  But I think we have been and will be talking about them around here.

________

*Kyung-Sun Kim and Sei-Ching Joanna Sin (December 2007), Perception and selection of information sources by undergraduate students: Effects of avoidant style, confidence and personal control in problem-solving.  Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33:6, 655-665.

**Dominic E. Madell and Steven J. Muncer (2007), Control over social interactions: An important reason for young people’s use of the Internet and mobile phones for communication, CyberPsychology and Behavior, 10:1, 137-140.