5. Promote search-skills for career-readiness and lifelong learning

Welcome to Part 5 and thanks for being here! 

College doesn't always properly prepare students for the information literacy skills they'll need in their life and career. The main problems are: 

Problem 1: Students don't know where or how to search.

All students are familiar with searching Google and they may also hear about Google Scholar sometime during their first or second year of college. So, they typically rely on these two tools for their information needs. But many students have no idea the library websites offers additional databases, or how to find those databases, or why those databases might be better to search. 

Furthermore, many students don't know how to search for sources. Typically they enter full sentences or long phrases into a search box, rather than using keywords. Google and Google Scholar are fairly forgiving when long strings of words are searched; these databases attempt to pick out keywords on the user's behalf, but often don't do a great job of it. Most library databases, on the other hand, will literally search for every word entered in the search box and only retrieve records that have each of those words, returning very poor results or no results at all!

When students search for sources on a topic and find very little that's relevant, they can't discern whether there are simply very few relevant sources on that topic, or whether their search strategy is flawed. They might get better results if they selected appropriate databases and strategically selected keywords, but this possibility will never occur to them unless we broaden their knowledge of where and how to search. 

How is Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services (RIS) team addressing this problem?

In Lesson 6 of the Information Literacy Basics tutorial (https://ac.nau.edu/lms-apps/self-enroll/447456), students learn tips for searching Quick Search on Cline Library's home page, and they learn how to find other databases offered on Cline Library's website. They also read about how to search with keywords and why.

But reading about something doesn't give you practice doing it, and that's what students really need.  That's where you come in.

How can YOU help address this problem?

Give students practice identifying the best databases to search on a topic, exploring the features of those databases, and searching with keywords. Students won't ever appreciate what library databases have to offer and how to search them unless they have ample opportunity to experiment. They need to see how different databases and different search strategies can produce better (or worse) results. Otherwise they'll continue to exclusively search Google and Google Scholar and never realize that when they get poor search results it might be because of where or how they're searching. 

Regarding these assignment ideas:

Problem 2: Students aren't learning skills for strategic, thorough searching.

In most college research assignments, students are asked to find and use a certain number of sources – such as five scholarly sources. But this isn't the way searching works in real life! In a real life career scenario, if you were asked to research something, you'd wouldn't find five relevant sources and then just stop. It's more likely you'd search until you felt confident you were not missing anything that might be relevant. 

But when students are only ever asked to find a few sources for college assignments, it's no wonder they ignore instructions to search multiple databases, to select strategic keywords, to add synonyms to their search, to set up Boolean searches, etc. They usually don't need those skills to find just a few sources. Those skills only matter when you need to be thorough. 

Students will never be motivated to learn effective skills for finding information unless they are presented with research scenarios in which it's important to find everything that's relevant to their topic. However, as you learned in Part 1, students are not learning these skills, as evidenced by the study conducted by Project Information Literacy.

How is Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services (RIS) team addressing this problem? 

Currently, RIS has no systematic plan to address this problem. These skills are too advanced to be tackled in the Information Literacy Basics tutorial – rather, they need to be addressed at the junior or senior level, and RIS can offer suggestions for how to do that. Read on! 

How can YOU help address this problem? 

Talk to students about how research works in the real world versus in college! Explore with them the possible repercussions of not knowing where or how to search for information when they land a career job. Invite professionals from your discipline into your classroom and have them talk about the skills they use to solve information problems. Or, consider creating assignments that explore these types of questions:

Regarding these assignment ideas:

Problem 2: Students should be better equipped to find scholarly information after they graduate.

We teach students to use campus library databases and other licensed scholarly resources provided by the campus library, but once they graduate, they'll lose access to those resources. But depending on where they land a career job, their company or organization may provide access to databases, plus they'll have access to free databases, public library databases, state library databases, and possibly campus library databases if they end up living near a campus library. 

We need to better prepare students to understand the resources available to them after they graduate, and how to access those resources!

How is Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services (RIS) team addressing this problem? 

There is currently no consistent, standard curricula to address this issue. We would like to explore and develop it though, and that's where you come in. 

How can YOU help address this problem?

Work with your RIS librarian to explore what sorts of information needs might arise for students in their chosen career, and then develop a list of information resources and search-skills students will likely need in order to be competitive for jobs. Use this as a starting point to develop curricula that teaches those skills. Ultimately, it would be ideal if all students graduating in your discipline were exposed to this curricula, so you may want to advocate for a consistent training program that all students must take.

Assignment ideas:

(Note: These assignment ideas are relevant to Learning Goal B or C.)

Regarding these assignment ideas:

Comment on this content and/or collaborate with NAU librarians to find other solutions to these problems!

The content on this page is a work in progress and we'd love to improve it! Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services team is interested to hear any comments or suggestions you have on the content presented on this page, or your ideas for other solutions. Also, if you've already created assignments that address these issues, or you have ideas for assignments that would help address these issues, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us!