ROI staff attend LOEX Conference in Minneapolis

The annual LOEX Conference was held in Minneapolis this year.  Each year this conference is held in different locales around the country and we we're fortunate to be able to attend the conference just a few miles away.   If you haven't heard of LOEX, it is a non-profit educational clearinghouse for library instruction and information literacy information. This conference offers information focusing on aspects of research, instruction and information literacy to libraries and librarians.  The breakout sessions covered a wide range of library instruction topics, from online information literacy to student motivation to improving your library's self-guided help.  For more information or to join visit about LOEX.  Below are brief summaries of a few of the sessions we attended.

Swim Relay: Using a Medley of Techniques to Teach Info Lit Concepts & Mechanics, presented by Sam Harlow and Maggie Murphy of the University of North Carolina Greensboro, covered two different instructional techniques: teaching analogies and concept-based tutorials. Harlow and Murphy examine why using analogies to teach mechanics is a good idea. An analogy can help a learner see the connection between two concepts in a relatable way. We can use that to explain a task, tool, or process quickly and compellingly.

Teaching analogies are best used when the content is relatable to the learner and they can easily explain the analog before you map it for the class.  Teaching concepts looks at the bigger picture of ideas and helps to organize and categorize information. Concept-based tutorials allow you to create tutorials that are not tied to a specific resource or interface letting the user apply the knowledge to the resource of their choice.  Access presentation slides and worksheets here: go.uncg.edu/swimrelay  (Written by Carla Pfahl)

One instruction tip I took away from the LOEX Conference was that as “expert” researchers, we need to make the sometimes implicit strategies we use for discovery and reading explicit to our students. In their session Using Reading Apprenticeship Techniques to Support Information Literacy Outcomes, Ryne Leuzinger and Jacqui Grallo, Research and Instruction Librarians from Cal State Monterey Bay, shared how they help their students become better evaluators of information and readers of complex texts by using metacognitive techniques such as “Thinking Aloud” and “Talking to the Text.”

Jacqui modeled the “Thinking Aloud” strategy as she verbalized her thought processes while deciding which resources from a list of search results might be most useful. Ryne described how he has students “Talk to the Text” in a double-entry reading log. While they read, students summarize what they see in one column and reflect on what they think about it in another. Students then share their notes and discuss the different ways we can approach and understand informational texts.

By modeling and having students try these techniques, we can help “pull back the curtain” for novice researchers as they learn and practice the great variety of strategies that can be useful throughout the research process. (Written by Linda Mork)

Uncovering First-Year Students' Conceptions of the Research Process, presented by Brianne Markowski and Rachel Dineen, of the University of Northern Colorado, offered a look at students, as well as librarians approach to the research process.  The activity of writing down our steps in the research process started the session.  If you haven't done this before, you might want to give it a try as it is something that as librarians we may overlook or take for granted.  Markowski and Dineen do this with first year students and then collect the research process maps.  Those attending this session were fortunate enough to get several of their students process maps as a handout.  Aside from seeing that most students have a linear research process, several themes arose.  Thinking about the topic, brainstorming, and topic development are real steps in many student's research processes.  After finding sources, another strong theme was to use sources, whether that means taking notes or using quotations.  Along those lines many students saw the idea of taking notes an important step in the research process.  Another theme they found was "write & revise," which can include rough draft revisions and seeking help from peers or professors.  Markowski and Dineen have learned that students want to have time to develop and brainstorm their topic while they need prompting to think critically about the sources they find.  I was genuinely impressed with the research process maps that many of their students put on paper.  (Written by Beth Staats)