A REQUEST FOR A MODEL LIBRARIAN/FACULTY COLLABORATION TO ENHANCE DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH SKILLS ACROSS THE CURRICULUM IN A HYBRID PRINT/ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT

 Libraries are on the cusp of change and researchers are faced with new resources and opportunities, but as the range of options expands, the skills needed to negotiate them increase in complexity. For the experienced researcher, adapting his or her research skills to these changes is a challenge; for the apprentice researcher, acquiring research skills in this changing environment is overwhelming. Libraries play an important role in fostering research as an essential learning activity, but traditional library instruction programs are not sufficient for teaching students the complex skills needed to conduct research in an increasingly complex information environment. We propose to implement an innovative, collaborative model for embedding developmental research skills in the curriculum and to study the results so that we can learn more about how students learn best in a hybrid print/electronic information environment. To accomplish this goal, Gustavus Adolphus College seeks a National Leadership Grant of $79,131 to conduct a Research and Demonstration project, to be matched by college funds for a project cost totaling $158,262.

Our project has three components: a librarians' institute in the summer of the first year to explore these issues with other academic librarians in the region, a development program for a pilot group of thirty Gustavus faculty who will redesign courses and assess the results of the changes they make to engage students in developmental, hands-on learning in the library across the entire curriculum, and an assessment component that will use this project as a laboratory for pedagogical research. We anticipate significant outcomes for librarians, faculty, and students, including a chance to create a new collaborative model of developmental research skills instruction, a toolkit of successful classroom materials and assessment techniques, an opportunity to explore ways to improve student learning and disseminate what we learn, and an opportunity for students to learn how to interpret research tasks, find information, assess the authority of sources, put evidence to use, and recognize their role in creating knowledge so that they can apply these research skills beyond college. We look forward to launching a significant, on-going project that will be an agent of pedagogical change, one that provides us an opportunity to evaluate teaching and learning and share what we learn with a wide audience of librarians and educators.

Gustavus Adolphus College seeks a National Leadership Grant of $79,131 for a Research and Demonstration project from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The proposed project will support a program to develop librarian/faculty collaboration in order to successfully integrate the teaching of research skills as a process across the curriculum in a complex, hybrid print/electronic environment. Information gathered through this project will be used to develop assessment techniques for classroom teachers and academic libraries and to collect data for research into how students learn best in the current information environment. This project will be a demonstration of a new paradigm of research instruction and a laboratory for research into how to integrate the use of new electronic resources effectively in research instruction and to enhance students’ ability to make more effective use of information resources in college and beyond. The college has committed $79,131 of its own funds to support this important project.

Libraries are on the cusp of change. Just as the printing press was a profound agent of change, computers are revolutionizing the way knowledge is produced, disseminated, accessed, and put to use. Researchers are faced with new options and opportunities, but as the range of options expands, the skills needed to negotiate them increase in complexity. For the experienced researcher, adapting his or her research skills to these changes is a challenge; for the apprentice researcher, acquiring research skills in this changing environment is overwhelming.

Many institutions promote student research as a valuable learning experience, yet fail to integrate those experiences intentionally into the curriculum. Library instruction programs frequently attempt to tie research instruction to course objectives, but are frustrated in their attempts when research is not an integral part of the course. Though many library instruction programs attempt to introduce new electronic resources, the focus tens to fall on mastering the features of electronic tools rather than on the more complex tasks of formulating a research question, choosing and evaluating appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, and putting information to use. These issues, all the more complex in the hybrid print/electronic environment, cannot be addressed with current practices.

We want to create an innovative, collaborative program for research instruction at Gustavus Adolphus College that will go beyond learning how to access information to focus on a developmental process of research as an essential part of the curriculum using print and electronic media across the curriculum. We will use this opportunity to develop and test appropriate assessment measures for student learning and will gather and analyze data for better understanding how students learn in the current hybrid information environment so that this new paradigm for collaborative research instruction can be adapted in other academic settings.

What we want to accomplish with this project is ambitious. Simply put, we want the library to be an agent of pedagogical change. What we hope to do is work with faculty in the disciplines to embed research as an essential learning activity across the disciplines, develop methods to teach research skills developmentally, and create ways for students to negotiate information successfully in a hybrid print/electronic environment. Faculty and librarians at Gustavus Adolphus College value research as an important part of an undergraduate education. We want to embed those values in new and redesigned courses and learn from the process how to teach and learn effectively in the current, complex information environment. Our project has three components.

• Two summer institutes for librarians in the Minnesota colleges that are members of the Oberlin Group to prepare them to provide leadership across the campus in developing active learning techniques for students learning research skills in the hybrid print/electronic environment. The focus of the first institute will be on developing teaching strategies and collaborative relationships with faculty to enhance research as an essential part of the curriculum. The focus of the second institute will be on developing assessment measures for academic libraries that address student outcomes.
• A faculty development program that will involve two successive summer workshops for a pilot group of 30 faculty, 15 in each summer workshop, from across the disciplines so they can revise or develop courses that integrate developmental research experiences into the curriculum. The workshops will give faculty a chance to embed research instruction into the curriculum and will offer opportunities for explore ways to effectively teach research skills in a changing information environment. Follow up activities will engage these faculty in ongoing conversation as their courses are taught and evaluated.
• An assessment plan that uses information gathered from students and faculty in the program to generate practical solutions to problems, to help faculty and librarians develop new ways to assess student learning, and to develop new theory about how students learn in the hybrid print/electronic information environment.

This project will give us a chance to explore issues that are not only of prime importance at this institution, but which are pressing issues in higher education generally. This project offers a new paradigm for research instruction and will provide an opportunity to learn more about how students learn in the current information environment.

Research is a valued part of the curriculum at Gustavus, and we have in place many programs that support it. The library has provided support for research instruction for many years and recently committed substantial funds toward designing and furnishing a new electronic classroom in the library, opened at the beginning of the spring term, 1999. The library has developed a budget plan for a computer equipment replacement cycle that will ensure that the classroom will remain up-to-date in years to come. Other institutional programs that support learning include a Partners in Scholarship program that pairs promising students with faculty mentors, a well-developed information technology infrastructure, a robust writing-across-the-curriculum program, the first-term seminar, strong general education and major programs, and improved admission of graduating students to highly selective graduate programs. We annually send 30 to 40 students to present their projects at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, one of the largest college delegations in the country, and many students co-author articles with faculty, published in refereed journals, and present their findings at regional and national gatherings.

However, in spite of our success we have never had the opportunity to examine how these research programs relate to the courses we teach, how to embed undergraduate research skills across the curriculum and how best to teach the use of print and electronic resources now available as a developmental learning process. What we need now is time to focus intentionally on the pedagogical aspects of student research—time for librarians to consider ways to support research in the curriculum and time for faculty to plan courses and have conversations across disciplinary boundaries about how to teach research skills effectively. With these elements, and a pilot group of 30 faculty, 15 each in two summer workshops, we have an opportunity to create a model research instruction program at Gustavus that can be a laboratory for change, producing information about how students learn research skills best and a knowledge base of model teaching experiences and materials that can be emulated by libraries and colleges across the country.

We propose this project with five assumptions in place. First, we believe that research is a valuable experience for undergraduates. Research, even at a rudimentary level, demands critical thinking, reading, composing, and the formation of independent judgment. Research experiences—whether simple problem-solving tasks or more complex data-gathering and analysis—give students a deeper understanding of how knowledge is formed and how conflicting ideas can be negotiated. When they do research they actively play a role in knowledge formation, and can come to "own" their knowledge more profoundly than if they learn more passively through lectures or textbooks. The researcher, in effect, becomes a collaborative participant in the construction of knowledge, not merely a consumer of information.

Second, we believe that research as an activity is situated within disciplinary frameworks, and so needs to be addressed in terms of specific research traditions.

Third, we believe that the research process is complex and recursive and involves not just finding information but framing and refining an appropriate question, choosing and evaluating appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, interpreting material, and composing some kind of response. We need to bear in mind as we teach that research is a non-linear discovery process, not a set of discrete techniques.

Fourth, we believe that research skills, like writing skills, are developmental. They can’t be mastered in a single library session but must be built upon and practiced, both throughout the entire process of a research project and through the course of a student’s education.

And finally, we believe that the new technologies are offering more choices and more challenges, but the higher level skills employed in research are essentially the same whether you are using print or electronic resources. Too often instruction focuses on how the machine works or creates an artificial distinction between the medium and the information it contains. Though the researcher today must be able to use electronic tools, and know what is available and when it will be most useful, it is more important that he or she understands how these tools fit into the larger activity of research.

Librarians have expressed doubts about the effectiveness of traditional course related library instruction for many years. In 1990 Tom Eadie made the contentious claim that library instruction, as it is commonly practiced, is a waste of time because it "provides the answer before the question has arisen" (45). Earlier Stephen Stoan pointed out that the "research strategies" librarians teach bear little resemblance to the strategies used by researchers, but rather emulate librarians’ methods for answering reference questions. Barbara Valentine described actual research strategies as being driven more by practical needs and a desire to finish a project quickly than by a sophisticated engagement with the process. In a similar vein Carol Kuhlthau, Constance Mellon and Barbara Fister have all found students’ actual research practices differ significantly from the research strategies recommended by librarians, and all discovered that the process is more complex and less linear than generally acknowledged. In spite of good intentions, library instruction hasn’t played the pivotal role it could; it is telling that a recent Boyer Commission report on Reinventing Undergraduate Education puts great emphasis on the need for research to be the focal point for undergraduate learning, but nowhere in the report are library instruction programs mentioned as a supporting player.

If anything, the need for successful instruction in research skills is greater than ever. The current hybrid print/electronic library offers more resources and more opportunities, but also poses more problems for the inexperienced researcher. Publishing is undergoing a revolution. The Web makes it possible for anyone to publish for a world-wide audience, and the need to evaluate sources and sort through a myriad of choices, always tricky for novice researchers, has become a pressing issue. Scientific, technical, and medical publishers are moving toward putting their periodicals online, making more available but the search process more variable. Libraries, once developed as collections tailored to local needs, are now increasingly a gateway to shared resources that offer more but are less closely attuned to the undergraduate’s particular needs. A study conducted in 1997 by John Lubans found that college students still feel a need to use print as well as electronic resources and that many of them don’t feel confident about their ability to find information effectively. A follow-up study of high school students suggested they are more likely to favor electronic resources but still need help finding quality resources. The plethora of electronic products and their variant interfaces make the mechanics of research more demanding. Discussions on such electronic forums as BI-L and COLLIB-L demonstrate that librarians everywhere are struggling with inventing new ways to focus on research processes rather than tools, a more pressing issue now that the tools have become more complex. Janet Martorana and Keith Gresham warn that electronic classrooms can actually work against good practice, leading instruction to focus on mechanics rather than transferable concepts. Just as the mechanics become more complex, the need for learning conceptual models that transcend those specifics grows more important.

A collaborative approach, embedding the learning of skills in the curriculum, is an alternative that many find attractive, but it is difficult to achieve. "Information literacy" has been touted by Patricia Senn Brievik, D.W. Farmer and others as a new approach that could ensure that students can identify information needs, and find, use and evaluate information, learning skills they can apply throughout their life time. But it requires that librarians establish stronger partnerships. Loanne Snavely and Natasha Cooper have analyzed the ways in which establishing an information literacy program might compete with other agendas in higher education, arguing that it can be successfully integrated into other goals. Some librarians argue that partnerships between libraries and computing organizations on campus focused on using technology in the curriculum can lead to fruitful alliances; the UWired project at the University of Washington is an exemplary model. Others, such as Jean Sheridan, feel that alliances with faculty in the disciplines are more crucial and point to writing-across-the-curriculum programs as a model that could be emulated by librarians seeking to embed research skills in the disciplines.

We feel that, while working with the academic computing staff is important, collaborations with faculty are the key to a successful research skills program. As is found on many campuses, our faculty value research as a learning experience for undergraduates, but have not examined what changes need to be made in the curriculum to integrate those experiences in a manner that successfully addresses students’ developmental needs. Librarians here and elsewhere are finding that research skills are too important and too complex to be taught successfully through traditional, library-based means. We feel it is time for academic librarians to empower faculty to teach research skills holistically and in context, taking more responsibility for modeling the craft of research for student apprentices, just as the writing-across-the-curriculum placed the responsibility for writing instruction in the hands of faculty in the disciplines.

This project was developed out of focus group discussions with faculty and was defined by their statement of need. Faculty in a variety of disciplines, including art, English, foreign languages and communication studies, have expressed a strong interest in participating in the first summer program. We believe Gustavus Adolphus College, because of its long-standing instruction program, successful writing-across-the-curriculum experience, interest in assessment of student outcomes, and commitment to undergraduate research, is an ideal place to implement this model.

The library staff began to develop a strategic plan with an all staff retreat in May of 1997. We identified five areas of concern, and every member of the staff served on a committee to gather data and compile recommendations. A final report, available at http://gustavus.edu/Library/Pubs/StrategicPlan.html, was completed in January 1998. The task of refiguring library services to adapt to the opportunities and challenges of new technologies emerged as the dominant theme, and we quickly identified support for hands-on instruction integrating print and electronic resources as a critical priority. As we approached the problem of teaching research skills effectively, we held a series of conversations with students and faculty to get a wider perspective on the issues involved. (See Attachment B for a summary of focus group comments.) Out of those conversations this proposal began to evolve.

Faculty were most interested in opportunities for developing pedagogical support for research in the curriculum. They felt that technology wasn’t the challenge, using it well was. They also felt strongly that distinctions often made between print and electronic texts were superficial; that the most intractable problems students faced when doing research had to do with understanding where knowledge comes from, evaluating sources, and knowing how to ask questions and frame answers in terms appropriate to scholarship in the disciplines, all issues that are not dependent on the format of information. Students recognized many of the same problems and wanted to have more effective and sustained help in learning how to do research, asking that help come from both librarians and faculty in terms that address both finding information and putting it to use effectively. In particular they found library workshops conducted by librarians to be of some help, but expressed a desire for faculty in the disciplines to be more involved in teaching research skills and they wanted those skills to be taught intensively across the entirety of a course, integrating the finding of information with problem formulation, evaluation, and use of sources in writing.

What we learned from these focus groups bore out some of our assumptions. Students need different kinds of help throughout the research process, they need to engage in real research tasks repeatedly throughout their college careers in order to master research skills, and classroom faculty need to be involved in teaching the different stages of the research process within the conventions of the disciplines. As a result of these findings and of our strategic planning process we built and furnished a new instruction lab in the library that can serve as a facility for faculty development, for the active learning that students report as more effective than traditional lecture and demonstration, and for guided practice in the critical evaluation of both electronic and print resources.

We also learned many people are interested in seeing that the college’s research instruction efforts are improved. Though the library has a good instruction program—a 1994 external review of the library said it was "excellent in both quantity and quality"—it only scratches the surface. Our program, like most academic library programs, depends primarily on course-related sessions, tailored to class assignments, with the addition of first-year orientation tours and workshops and occasional credit courses. The typical class involves a 50-minute session in the library and includes, whenever possible, collaborative hands-on experience with research materials and an annotated resource guide (see Attachment C for a profile of the program.) The course-related instruction model acknowledges that research skills are contextualized in disciplines and that learning will be most effective when tied to a genuine need, but it fails to address research skills developmentally—most library sessions occur only once in a semester and don’t build sequentially on one another—and does not integrate finding information into the total research process because the brief session tends to focus on locating information, with only a nod toward how that information might ultimately be put to use. It seemed clear from our strategic planning process and our conversations with students and faculty that the concerns librarians, faculty, and students have about research instruction are convergent and would benefit from a stronger collaboration among librarians and the teaching faculty so that faculty would have an opportunity to design research instruction into their teaching.

Our proposal has three components. These are development opportunities for librarians in the region, a two-year cycle of faculty workshops to develop a core group of faculty across the curriculum who will redesign courses to consciously develop research skills, and an assessment process that will use these experiences to develop new understanding of how students learn research skills best.

Development Program for Librarians Academic librarians generally have a strong interest in the instructional role they can play at their institutions, but need to find new ways to collaborate with faculty to make research instruction more strongly embedded in the curriculum, particularly in the increasingly complex information environment. This program for librarians will consist of two summer institutes for college librarians at the five Minnesota Oberlin Group colleges. The first summer institute will use two days to focus intensively on pedagogical issues facing libraries in the current hybrid information environment. We will discuss pedagogical issues involved with integrating print and electronic resources in teaching, share problems and solutions, and demonstrate for one another how we use active learning techniques in the classroom. The object of the first institute is to critically examine alternative paradigms of research instruction, develop a toolbox of effective teaching techniques, and explore best practices for fostering undergraduate research using print and electronic resources. The second summer institute will offer an opportunity to reflect on any changes we might have put in place since the previous institute and will focus on developing effective assessment measures that academic libraries can use to track student outcomes.

The Minnesota Oberlin Group college librarians have been meeting for some years now to discuss electronic resources and their use; it will be an excellent group of professionals to serve as a catalyst for this project and will offer an opportunity to involve other institutions early in the project. Our connections with the 74 national Oberlin Group institutions that communicate with an active discussion list and an annual conference will give us a venue for sharing our findings informally and frequently with a wide audience. Although the composition of the group is from liberal arts college libraries, the questions we will be grappling with are ones shared by academic libraries of all types and the solutions we will arrive at, disseminated to a wider academic library audience according to our dissemination plan detailed below, will be applicable in many situations.

Faculty Development The development program for faculty in the disciplines will involve a core group of Gustavus faculty in two successive summer programs, with 15 participants each summer. Faculty will be invited to submit proposals to redesign a course or create a new one that consciously embeds a process for learning research skills. These proposals will be reviewed by an advisory committee consisting of the project leaders and three faculty members from the Faculty Development Committee, the Writing Program, and the First-Term Seminar. The faculty chosen for the workshops must be committed to creating new pedagogical approaches to teach research skills throughout the course. We will intentionally choose a balance of faculty designing courses at different levels, from first-term seminars to senior capstone courses, and spread across the disciplines, hoping that this distribution will allow for the best infusion of ideas for teaching throughout the curriculum.

Each summer program will start with a week-long intensive workshop that begins on the morning of the first day with a presentation by an outside expert who can examine the research process, particularly as it relates to undergraduates using print and electronic resources. We will have morning sessions conducted by on-campus specialists who will lead the faculty in guided discussion of some of our basic assumptions and of recognized problems that students face as apprentice researchers. Topics addressed will include anticipating the problems undergraduate researchers experience in the hybrid print/electronic information environment, developing effective research assignments, exploring ways of supporting students throughout the research process with guidance and feedback, helping students learn how to think critically about sources, particularly making choices among electronic materials and between print and electronic resources, and developing techniques for classroom research and assessment. Afternoon sessions will allow time for faculty to respond to that morning’s topic and to share their experiences and discuss common issues. During part of at least two afternoons faculty will divide into small groups to discuss best practice for teaching research skills in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences, and into groups based on course level. An integral part of the afternoon sessions will be time spent drafting research assignments and classroom activities and these will be shared as they are developed.

We anticipate, for example, that a biology teacher may want to build research experiences into a required course for majors by developing a sequence of assignments that familiarize a large class with the biological research process, from learning how to identify the features of a published research paper in the field, to scanning current literature to identify pressing issues in a subdiscipline, to formulating a research hypothesis and conducting a literature review, to writing up a formal research proposal. A history teacher may want to develop a methods course that involves students in locating unique primary sources in the college archives or a local county history museum, develop commentary for those sources that situate them in historical context and annotations that explain particular points of the documents, and then prepare a web exhibit of them. A teacher of an interdisciplinary first term seminar may want to model college-level inquiry for new students by developing a series of exercises and assignments that take them through each step of the research process with frequent feedback and guidance. A teacher who has taught a research-intensive sociology course for many years and who wants to become more familiar with current information resources may want to redesign the course to emphasize the use of new electronic resources.

The program will continue throughout the summer as faculty complete course design. In the weeks following the workshop, faculty will have the opportunity to work closely with librarian/liaisons to their departments, to practice teaching in the electronic classroom, and to continue conversation by means of an e-mail discussion list for participants and regular informal meetings. We will meet at the end of the summer to share redesigned syllabi and will continue to collaborate through the academic year with the meetings and discussion list. We will sponsor a reunion of these initial faculty participants at the end of the first and second years to compare notes. Selected faculty from the first summer will speak about their revised courses to second year faculty and otherwise serve as resources.

During each school year following the workshops, the library will sponsor two events for students and faculty involved in the redesigned courses, one a panel of student/faculty research partners discussing their work and another a panel of regional publishers—the University of Minnesota Press, a representative from a scholarly journal, a small regional publishing house, and someone involved in electronic publishing—to talk about the publication process. We feel optimistic that these activities will be productive because the original idea of focusing this project on faculty development and pedagogical issues came from the faculty focus groups. In addition, similar summer faculty development programs at Gustavus have been successful for writing-across-the-curriculum, the first-term seminar, and service learning.

After the grant period, the library will foster ongoing infusion of research activities throughout the curriculum by sponsoring a series of short workshops on issues relating to pedagogy for undergraduate research held during the semester, by continuing to track student research presentations and publications, and by serving as a clearinghouse for teaching materials and assessment tools. Pending a successful evaluation of the pilot program, we will hold similar summer workshops every three years for new faculty or faculty newly interested in revising their curriculum. After the initial pilot program is completed we will also encourage departments to examine or assess their programs to see where student research fits into the majors, seek support for departmental retreats if there is an interest in revising programs to more intentionally build in sequenced research apprenticeships into their curriculum, or otherwise strengthen an existing research focus.

Assessment: Evaluation and Dissemination Plan This program of evaluation and dissemination will provide the raw material and the setting for research projects designed to explore how students approach research tasks and how we can create better conditions for learning in a complex print and electronic information environment. This effort will have three kinds of outcomes: we will learn how to improve teaching on our campus, we will develop effective teaching practices that can be adapted for use in other academic settings, and we will use the project as a laboratory to develop new theory about how students learn. We feel this process of evaluation and dissemination is key to improving and sustaining the impact of the program both locally and nationally.

We intend to build on a study done by Barbara Fister at Gustavus in 1990 exploring the special characteristics of the undergraduate research process. The previous study challenged the standard process approach taught in library instruction programs. It will be exciting to return to the questions raised in that study and focus on how students cope in a hybrid print and electronic environment to expand our understanding of how we can best teach research skills in the current information environment. The library annually awards a competitive scholarship to a student to undertake a research project of benefit to the college; we may be able to design a series of interviews to be carried out and analyzed by a student. (See Attachment D for an example of such a scholarship project, a report on student research activities at Gustavus.)

One major component of the faculty summer programs will be considering how to measure student outcomes. The information we gather will not only be useful on the micro-level (such as how to improve a single classroom exercise) but also can serve as the basis for some larger-scale research projects undertaken by faculty and librarians involved in the project. It will also provide an opportunity for librarians to develop new means of measuring student outcomes. This change in the paradigm of evaluation of academic libraries from counting volumes and transactions to measuring how a library program affects student learning, is a challenge that all academic libraries struggle with as accreditation standards evolve and as the focus for measuring excellence shifts from size of collection to the library’s impact on the curriculum. Our project will consciously address those issues and will seek to develop methods that can be applied at other colleges.

Gustavus faculty are productive scholars, interested in improving their teaching as evidenced, in part, by the current focus on institution-wide assessment of student outcomes. We are engaged in a campus-wide discussion of assessment that includes the development of department-by-department student outcomes and measures for discovering how well we meet them, in preparation for our next North Central Association accreditation visit. (See appendix E for the library’s assessment plan.) This is a critical moment for faculty in the pilot program to learn more about how to assess student learning of the research process and to incorporate undergraduate research outcomes in their departmental assessment plans. Faculty will have the opportunity to learn methods of classroom assessment that will provide them with quick, practical feedback, and will be encouraged to integrate their findings into department-wide assessment and goal-setting. We will also assist faculty research into pedagogical issues in their discipline, encouraging them to share what they learn with colleagues in their disciplines through conference presentations and publications.

In the library we will compare survey responses from several years’ worth of student and faculty evaluations of traditional library instruction sessions with surveys gathered from classes involved in the program. This should give us an overall notion of how students in general respond to the new model and the librarians’ role as part of a collaboration. We will also be able to explore how electronic resources and a hands-on computer classroom have affected student attitudes.

Completed assignments will also provide raw material for assessing the program and for developing new methods of assessment that can be adopted in other settings. The project leaders will work with faculty to collect a sample of completed research assignments from students in the redesigned courses and work up a protocol for assessing aspects of the students’ research abilities, from choosing appropriate evidence to how well they use that evidence in writing. A heuristic for evaluation will be a useful assessment tool for teachers as they grade papers. It certainly would help us discover whether, across the board, we have particular strengths or weaknesses that need to be addressed in future faculty development activities. We can compare these with a sample of completed research assignments from courses that are not intentionally teaching research skills in this manner and see if our program leads to significant improvement. We could also use this data to examine differences encountered among disciplines and at different course levels. Beyond applying this data to local situations, we will use this experience to work toward developing a heuristic for measuring student research skills in context that will be applicable in other institutions to measure student outcomes. Academic librarians engaged in instruction have lacked a means of assessing their work in context; evaluation of our efforts tends to focus on testing and on evaluating bibliographies rather than on assessing how well information has been put to use in practice. A heuristic for this kind of assessment could be a useful tool for other library instruction programs interested in assessing their effectiveness.

We will collect "before and after" syllabi and research assignments from the faculty in the pilot program and will map out what changes were made in terms of teaching the research process and addressing the special characteristics of research in a print and electronic environment. We will follow up with structured conversations with the faculty in our reunions to get their sense of how well they feel we are meeting the outcomes above or any others that they have individually set. Out of an examination of syllabi and assignments we will create an evolving "best practices" clearinghouse for our faculty to share assignments, ideas, and assessment tools. The information gained from syllabi, assignments, and structured conversations will help us arrive at effective models for integrating research processes into the curriculum that could be presented to both librarians and teachers in the disciplines through conference presentations and in such publications as Research Strategies, College Teaching, The American Biology Teacher, and College Composition and Communication.

These development activities for librarians and faculty and the intentional and structured examination of the results will be the catalyst of long-term curricular change at our institution and a model for fostering and understanding student research needs and skills in academic settings generally. We already have an exemplary record of research collaboration between faculty and students at Gustavus. We hope that the faculty in the pilot program will model effective research instruction throughout the curriculum and, thereby, inspire departmental and college-wide pedagogical support for student research that can serve as a national model.

The college is committed to supporting infrastructure that will enable this change and is currently working to establish endowments for student research, faculty development, and information technology as part of a six year, $92 million comprehensive campaign that is now in its second year. We have a significant endowment for library acquisitions and have a hardware replacement cycle in our budget to maintain our support for the project.

The project leaders, Barbara Fister and Sandy Fuhr, have over 18 years experience in library instruction between them. Barbara Fister has published widely on the parallels of writing programs and library instruction, and her articles on undergraduate research have been assigned as readings in graduate courses on instruction. She also has been responsible for creating and monitoring the library's 1.4 million dollar budget since 1994 and for managing a staff of 15 since 1997. She is currently chair of the faculty advisory committee for information technology. Sandy Fuhr is responsible for electronic resources in the library and has experience in building coalitions for libraries, having been instrumental in raising public support for a new public library in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. She is currently serving on the campus curriculum committee, which is engaged in a review of general education. In preparation for this project, the project leaders have consulted with other campus personnel—directors of the writing and first-term seminar programs, members of the faculty development committee, the Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs, librarians, faculty, and students. We have consulted with the heads of Media Services and Information Technology on our campus and have made site visits to other programs at libraries in the region.

We will finalize the details of the two summer development programs with input from the librarians of the Minnesota Oberlin Group and faculty on campus using focus groups, e-mail discussion, and individual conversations to ensure that we have anticipated their needs and interests. We expect to benefit from the experience of foreign language faculty teaching in a new electronic classroom— funded by $150,000 grants from the Charles E. Culpeper and the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundations—that opened in 1996 to assist us in exploring effective ways to use our new electronic classroom for active learning. During the grant period and beyond, we will draw on campus expertise as needed—from Information Technology and Media Services in particular—and the network of Oberlin Group librarians, as appropriate.

The project leaders will be responsible for collecting and analyzing data as they are gathered and will coordinate dissemination of the results of the project, both on campus and nationally. We will maintain a web site for the project that will allow for continuing discussion, sharing of materials, and dissemination of research results.

We anticipate the following outcomes:

• an opportunity to develop and test a new paradigm for research instruction
• a deeper understanding of the whole research process in an emerging, hybrid print/electronic environment
• a pedagogical toolbox for active learning activities for research instruction
• closer working relationships with faculty in the disciplines in fostering research activities
• opportunities to gather data and assess relative merits of instruction practices
• an opportunity to share ideas with other librarians and faculty in the disciplines
• an opportunity to develop significant research projects relating to student research processes and to develop assessment measures of student outcomes to use in academic library program evaluation

• revised course offerings that intentionally involve students in learning research methods through thoughtful assignments and structured support activities
• a campus-wide focus on the research process in a complex, hybrid print/electronic environment and the fundamental role of undergraduate research in a liberal arts education
• greater familiarity with research tools, print and electronic, and how they might benefit the curriculum
• tools for assessing student learning in the classroom and in written assignments
• closer working relationships with librarians in fostering student engagement in research
• an opportunity to develop teaching practices of interest to other faculty in their disciplines

• skills for interpreting a research task so they can understand what evidence, both print and electronic, is needed to complete it successfully
• means of recognizing text types, such as scholarly versus popular writing, primary sources versus secondary sources, regardless of format
• greater familiarity with research traditions in the disciplines and current research tools
• the ability to find information appropriate for a task by choosing relevant tools, selecting options, interpreting citations, and reformulating their needs as they learn more about their topic (See the Model Statement of Objectives for Bibliographic Instruction for a more detailed list of these skills.)
• the ability to assess the authority of sources and detect bias
• an understanding of how to use evidence in their research, both in terms of how to write from sources and how to avoid plagiarism
• a clearer understanding of how knowledge is produced and the role they play as knowers
• a recognition that research is a meaningful activity for life beyond college

The opportunities to gather data and use them to explore questions that will be interesting to librarians at other institutions and teachers across the disciplines are many. We can anticipate, for example, faculty and librarians designing a number of small-scale studies that examine parts of the research process, effective ways to teach research skills in particular disciplines, or how students at different levels learn research skills. One faculty member has suggested we consider collecting and reporting the results of this project in a monograph. Certainly, there are many opportunities to share ideas and experiences, both in library publications and through journals that address college teaching or college writing instruction. It is interesting to note that among publications that appear in the CCCC Annual Bibliography, those that discuss research writing are few in number, even though research writing is a common feature of undergraduate assignments. We feel that many college teachers and librarians will be interested in the results of this project. Although the project setting is a selective liberal arts college, we expect the results—improved teaching methods, assessment tools, and research into how students approach research in the current information environment—to be applicable in any academic setting, from community college to major research university.

In addition to publications, we expect to continually share our experiences and the course materials we develop through formal and informal means. The librarians and faculty involved in the project are all connected, through discussion lists and state and national organizations, to communities that are interested in these issues. There are many conferences, such as those for teaching in the disciplines, library instruction, or writing instruction, where librarians and faculty could present results of research and practice derived from this project. We will also set up a web site for sharing assignments, exercises, and assessment techniques developed by faculty in the pilot program to encourage better research instruction at Gustavus; this could easily be announced through relevant discussion lists so it could reach an international audience. We will consider collecting and submitting relevant reports or course materials to the ERIC and LOEX clearinghouses. And we expect to build on our Minnesota Oberlin Group summer institute to continue fruitful collaborations on technology and pedagogy.

In short, we are compelled by the need to find better ways to involve students more effectively in the research process and feel that others in higher education stand to benefit from what we learn.