One-shot Instruction Sessions Research Articles

Creative Pedagogy in Information Literacy

Creative pedagogy is not well defined and has not yet received much attention in the field of library and information science. This research employed constructivist grounded theory, through semi-structured interviews conducted with library information literacy instructors, to better understand the role of creative pedagogy in information literacy. The aim of the research was to synthesize findings into a theory to better understand how and to what extent creative pedagogy is being applied in the teaching of information literacy. The findings show that although they do not necessarily use the language of creativity, many library instructors are integrating elements of creative pedagogy into their teaching. Perceived challenges, such as being a guide or guest in someone else’s classroom and in connecting with students around information, as well as opportunities in both the physical and virtual classroom spaces, seem to require a shift in the way information literacy engagement takes place. Library instructors recognize the need for these shifts but many struggle to implement an alternative approach in the information classroom. At the same time, library instructors face several barriers, including a lack of preparation for their teaching role and the limitations of the one-shot instruction session.

Teaching the politics of citation: Challenging students’ perceptions

In many of my regular one-shot instruction sessions, I often ask students why we cite in our work. The responses are typically the same: to avoid an Honor Code violation, because plagiarism is wrong, to give credit. Sometimes I’ll hear “to find other articles.” All these responses are correct and valid reasons to cite. But I often feel like the idea of “credit” feels vague to students and that the consequences of not giving credit affect the person who should be citing, rather than the person not being cited. So often students, especially undergraduates, are taught citations with the message: if you do not cite, you will be penalized. Students are threatened with punitive measures from their professors or the honor council should they mis-cite or plagiarize. I often have students schedule reference consultations with me seeking help to fix their citations to make up points lost—and for some, those technical errors were the only major concerns with the paper. We have been teaching from a place of compliance and fear—fear of plagiarizing, fear of losing points on technicalities. It’s no wonder they don’t engage when we teach how to correctly craft an article citation in their discipline’s style.

Discovering research across the disciplines: Redesigning a librarian-taught honors course

Academic librarians are leading credit-bearing courses to improve information literacy skills. Librarians at the University of Nevada, Reno teach an Honors College course focused on discovering research in multiple disciplines. This course was converted from a 1-credit course to a 3-credit course. Positive updates to the new course included more flexibility, new content and assignments, and more time to discuss a variety of disciplines. Changes to be revisited for future iterations include rescheduling units and assignments and developing more instructor knowledge of research methods. Teaching a semester-long credit-bearing course helps librarians experiment with teaching strategies that cannot be completed in one-shot instruction sessions.

Embedded librarians in academic libraries: impact, assessment, and sustainability

Academic librarians are continually looking for ways to impact student learning. Embedded librarianship can be a method to connect with students in ways that cannot be accomplished with one-shot instruction sessions. The following eight articles were selected for their excellence in researching and sharing embedded librarian experiences in a variety of academic library settings.

Is the Library One-Shot Effective? A Meta-Analytic Study

The one-shot instruction session is a dominant mode of teaching in academic libraries. While many conference presentations and articles about methods have been shared, there is little consensus about whether a single library session promotes student learning about information literacy topics. This meta-analysis gathers studies that employ quantitative measures of student learning in an attempt to determine if the one-shot is an effective modality for learning. Results indicate the need for a more critical look at the grouping of “one-shot” as a methodology and the need for further robust research on acquisition of student learning outcomes in the one-shot context.

Undoing Our Instructional Past: Envisioning New Models for Information Literacy

Considering all that we know about learning science, design principles, and reflective practice, is the one-shot instruction session an effective mode of knowledge transfer? If we could build information literacy initiatives from the ground up, based on students’ prior experience and how they learn, our teaching would not be limited by past practice and our instructional roles could evolve in new ways. As a result, we would design and lead information literacy through a combination of opportunities such as teacher-training programs and instructional consultations intended to build scaffolded research assignments; librarian-faculty collaborations that prioritize the transferability of knowledge while honoring and disrupting disciplinary ways of thinking; and learning objects that provide an intentional structure for sustaining information literacy at our institutions.

The First-Year Library Instruction One-Shot: A Place for Caring

An academic librarian providing one-shot instruction sessions to first-year students is uniquely positioned to enact a feminist ethic of care in the classroom. First-year university students are particularly in need of caring. The library instruction session is often their introduction to and first impression of the library and an opportunity to inspire a relationship with the librarian and library. The instruction session, then, should be seen as an open door to a future relationship between librarian and student. The librarian is not the professor and, therefore, has the freedom to focus a primary learning objective on caring.

Kevin M. Gannon. Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020. 166p. Paper, $19.99 (ISBN 978-1-9491-9951-2).

Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by Kevin Gannon is a small, moving book that demonstrates the power of praxis by synthesizing theories within the scholarship of teaching and learning into concise, frank, easy-to-read, practice-focused chapters. The intended audience is teachers: folks in higher education who are face-to-face with students every day while simultaneously navigating administrative structures. Librarians who teach, whether primarily one-shot instruction sessions or credit-bearing courses, will be reinvigorated by discussions of meaningful reasons to teach, recognize familiar challenges, reflect on thought-provoking big-picture questions, and identify immediately applicable practices.

The Impact of Library Instruction on Undergraduate Student Success: A Four-Year Study

During a four-year period, librarians collected student data by card-swiping undergraduate students who attended one of the core English composition class-based one-shot instruction sessions provided at a large state-supported doctoral-granting university. Data for students who attended library instruction was anonymized and compared to the same data points for students who were enrolled in the English class but did not attend library instruction. The authors compared student success indicators for the control and treatment groups (GPA, pass or fail status in course, and retention) and found a positive correlation between attending library instruction and student success.

Uncovering the information literacy skills of first-generation and provisionally admitted students

Librarians have experimented with a variety of instructional models, from one-shots to tutorials to semester-long information literacy courses, to increase the impact of information literacy instruction. This study assessed the information literacy gains of students who participated in the pilot of a new instructional model, in which librarians developed and taught a first-year composition course aimed at first-generation, provisionally-admitted college students. This project demonstrated that this model improved students' performance on a standardized information literacy assessment in comparison with students who received instruction in the form of a one-shot instruction session. The study also explored the information literacy knowledge and skills of students targeted by this approach, including first-year students, first-generation students, and provisionally-admitted students.

Testing a Warmth-Based Instruction Intervention for Reducing Library Anxiety in First-Year Undergraduate Students

Abstract
 Objective – This study aimed to test the efficacy of a warmth-based library instruction intervention in reducing rates of library anxiety in first-year undergraduate students. "Warmth" is a concept that is commonly discussed within literature on library anxiety, but to date no studies have explicitly tested the application of a warmth-based instruction intervention. First-year students are ideal targets for this intervention because they are the most likely to experience library anxiety.
 Methods – A quasi-experiment was conducted examining library anxiety rates in first-year undergraduate students at a public research university in the U.S. South. A one-shot warmth-based instruction session focusing on the emotional dimensions of library use was compared to a standard one-shot instruction session. Library anxiety was measured using a modified version of Bostick's Library Anxiety Scale as a pretest and posttest.
 Results – Results indicated that both warmth-based and standard library instruction were associated with a decrease in participants' library anxiety rates without significant differences between the types of instruction. However, warmth-based instruction was correlated with greater reductions in areas of library anxiety related to interactions with library workers. Though library anxiety rates decreased significantly after experiencing library instruction, participants exhibited low levels of library anxiety before their library instruction session occurred.
 Conclusion – Though warmth-based instruction did not have a significantly different impact than standard library instruction on general library anxiety, the intervention tested in this study suggests strategies that could be used to increase student comfort with library workers. This study also demonstrates a successful method to include emotional factors such as library anxiety in academic libraries' regular assessment programs. Focusing assessment on students' skills and knowledge alone risks ignoring an important aspect of student engagement and missing opportunities for academic libraries to connect with students. Assessment of emotional components of library instruction initiatives is especially crucial to ensure and demonstrate that libraries are using their resources effectively to maximize student success.

Contingent teaching through low-tech audience response systems

For one-shot instruction sessions, formative assessment is the most feasible method for gathering data to aid contingent teaching, the practice of adapting to learners’ needs. Various technologies aid in the quick and efficient gathering of data on student learning in the classroom that can be used for formative assessment. Outside of a library teaching space or computer classroom, it is difficult to know what technology is available, what technology students can access, and how best to aid data collection that engages students, provides meaningful data to allow for contingent teaching, and is not dependent on student technology ownership. A low-tech audience response system has provided an opportunity to collect data on student learning and enable contingent teaching. This project report contributes to the field of information literacy research describing how a low-tech audience response system supports contingent teaching and innovates practice in different classroom situations.

Defining and teaching information literacy: Engaging faculty and the Framework

For librarians at Keene State College, the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education solidified moving away from one-shot instruction sessions and toward initiatives that would better integrate information literacy into the curriculum. This approach meant moving away from the idea that librarians must be teaching information literacy and instead adapting the idea that faculty within the discipline are best positioned to teach information literacy through their disciplinary context.

Overcoming Challenges to Critical Information Literacy: Primary Source Analysis as Consciousness-Raising

Critical information literacy can be described as the application of critical pedagogy, or a theory of learning that endeavors to impact social change, to information literacy. The use of critical pedagogy in information literacy instruction is simultaneously on-trend in theory and also criticized for the obstacles to its practical implementation. Due to historic collecting practices in archives and special collections libraries, teaching with archival collections presents an advantageous way to integrate critical information literacy. This case study describes the use of primary source analysis as a critical information literacy tool in a one-shot instruction session for a cross-listed communications and women’s studies course, focusing on gender roles and communication.

ACT UP for evaluating sources: Pushing against privilege

Like most librarians, I teach one-shot instruction sessions for numerous departments across campus on myriad topics. Fortunately, most faculty give me the entire class period to go over research techniques and evaluating sources. Prior to 2017, my discussion around evaluating sources happened towards the end of the class period, after I had demoed a few databases and searched the library catalog. This worked until it didn’t anymore. After the 2017 presidential inauguration, faculty and students returned to a more complex classroom climate, accentuated by tension, fear, and sadness.

Taking care of business (before class): Information literacy in a flipped classroom

This case study presents the revision of an upper-division one-shot instruction session to include an online tutorial that introduces students to business information sources prior to the library session. In order to complete the assignment and prepare for the library session, students are prompted to find specific information using the given resource, and then consider questions regarding the information retrieved. Students in a 3000-level business writing class responded positively to the activity while providing a good amount of material to inform further iterations of the assignment.

Teaching FYI: A learning experience

In the fall of 2016, faced with a record number of incoming first-year students, the Franklin Pierce University administration asked two members of the library faculty to teach sections of First Year Inquiry (FYI). As instruction librarians, we both had experience standing in front of a room and delivering interactive one-shot instruction sessions. We were now faced with the challenging task of designing and implementing a semester-long class, as well as becoming advisors to the roughly 20 students who had signed up to take it.

Classroom Management and the Librarian

As librarians take on more instructional responsibilities, the need for classroom management skills becomes vital. Unfortunately, classroom management skills are not taught in library school and therefore, many librarians are forced to learn how to manage a classroom on the job. Different classroom settings such as one-shot instruction sessions and for-credit courses require different management techniques. Also, individuals are often more comfortable with certain strategies compared to other strategies for managing a classroom. With different course settings and personalities of instructors the need to learn classroom management strategies must be recognized for its importance in successful classes taught by librarians.

Shifting expectations: Revisiting core concepts of academic librarianship in undergraduate classes with a digital humanities focus

ABSTRACTThis article explores best practices for supporting digital humanities (DH) activity and pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom on campuses without a DH center in the library. By examining specific aspects of librarians' curricular engagements, with a particular focus on reference and instructional activity, we discuss how reenvisioning these services aids in the development of effective support for both faculty and students engaged in DH. An included case study illustrates how redefining “traditional” librarian liaison roles and shifting expectations of faculty from one-shot instruction sessions to embedded librarianship models can be put into practice in undergraduate classrooms with a DH focus. The article concludes with a discussion of the librarian as digital humanist and how this role can positively impact undergraduate curricula.

Don't Use a Hammer When You Need a Screwdriver: How to Use the Right Tools to Create Assessment That Matters

Instruction librarians want clear data showing the effectiveness of our workshops as a way of demonstrating our value in education. This article uses instructional design approaches to show how to make specific changes when writing and measuring our learning outcomes to capture what we are doing in our sessions. Unlike classes that develop over the course of several months, we are faced with unique challenges when conducting one-shot instruction sessions. By focusing our attention on student satisfaction and learning, we see ways to improve those sessions for everyone involved. In this essay, we provide examples and discuss how to write effective learning outcomes to answer specific questions about learner satisfaction and what the participants learned. In addition, we suggest ways to reform the evaluation and assessment questions that we use to reinforce our lessons. These methods can be used in both online and face-to-face environments.