Week 3 Learning Theories

1. discuss which theory/ies might be most applicable to your instruction and outline a specific activity/assignment/exercise that would facilitate learning according to that theory. 

I am mostly teaching the library instruction based on students' actual writing assignment and using active-learning teaching module; however, from our study, the results are not as well as we thought.  While reading Cooperstein's Beyond active learning: a constructivist approach to learning, it will lead students to think and ask questions. 

One activity I normally do is demonstrating how to identify scholarly/peer-review journals.  I am thinking to redesign the activity:
Step 1. Explain what a scholarly/peer-review journal is.
Step 2. Ask students to identify an assigned journal's type, whether it is a peer-reviewed journal, and the audience from any website they choose in 2 minutes.
Step 3. Let students to share searching results.
Step 4. Introduce Ulrich's Periodicals Directory
Step 5. Ask students to the same search on Ulrich in 2 minutes.
Step 6. Let students to share searching results. 

As mentioned in the article, do not design the activity with an open-end problem that students could easily find answers from websites, and they will see how easily to use the library database, and this is the reason I set up the time limitation so that students could see how quick and easy once they use the library database.  In addition, I only have 90 minutes to 2 hours for each session that I have to make sure there are enough time for each activity.

However, I couldn't find a way to redesign research activities from active-learning module because it may confuse students since I don't have enough time to explain everything and let students to compare.


2. Write a brief post addressing how you are going to motivate your learners/students, and align your response with the information drawn from Small's article on motivation.

I work closely with professors to make sure I understand what information students need to receive for their assignment.  Meanwhile, students must understand that they NEED to enrich research skills for their writing/research assignments.  However, it doesn't work well to some students when they come to the library instruction unless there are something that they need to accomplish.  For instance, I worked with my colleagues to meet writing professors to discuss requesting students to submit a full-text article by end of the session, and/or able to answer a problem from the professor to identify/write APA style after the course.  Therefore, there are ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION.