Situational factors and Significant learning goals

Situational Factors:
I am teaching Information Literacy to upper division and graduate level research/writing courses.  The course's goal is teaching students to do an academic research with library's resources based on the research assignment.  Each course has approximately 25 students and meets two hours per semester in the library computer lab.  The session is designed active-learning teaching model which means students will practice while I am demonstrating and we will discuss searching strategies and different databases.

The learning objects are placed by the college liaison librarian(s) that my two engineering colleagues and I decide that students will be able to identify peer-reviewed/scholarly journals, understand Boolean logic, citations, and research management tool from us.

Graduate students have more research knowledge and skills than upper division students, which I give more time to practice and discuss but I will demonstrate and explain more to upper division students.

I am enjoy learning new things and eager to know about students.  At the end of each session, students are requested to fill out an open survey so that I could know students knowledge levels and understand if the session designed the way that students could learn easily and if learning objects meet students information needs, and if the content is too much or not enough too them.  And follow up library consultants are available to students.



Significant learning goals:
I want students to understand the different of the academic resources and public resources through the session; be critical to identify scholarly journals.  I hope students enrich research strategies and Boolean logic to search effectively, remember the library has multiple databases that they could find scholarly journal articles with accurate information.   From the course, students could see the research assignment as a whole picture and able to use variety of keywords and subjects to search and refine results.  In addition, students could able to use research management tool to organize their search results efficiently.  The session could help students to be "good" students with research skills to meet their academic and professional goals in the future.