Designing Instruction Activities to Guide Students Through the Research Lifecycle: A Science Librarian Approach

Abstract

Integrating research experiences into teaching and learning has gradually become essential in higher education. To support learning knowledge and skills needed for research, librarians traditionally provided instructions with a focus on information literacy to students. However, with the increasing importance of data and information in scientific research in recent years, science librarians are expanding our scope of instruction to more areas throughout the research lifecycle. As information specialists with Science background, science librarians have a unique role in providing guidance and support to understand research process, communicate research ideas and results, obtain research funding, find, organize, evaluate and synthesize information as well as scientific data. In this study, we will first survey the literature to identify instructions which science librarians have designed to guide students through various steps of the research lifecycle. Then, two for-credit courses on research skills provided by the University of Michigan Library, one for first-/second-year undergraduates and another for post-second-year students in Science major, will be described and examined to demonstrate our successes and the challenges we encounter. In addition, we will also report other efforts dedicated to support students with research including managing references and data, presenting research results, writing scientific articles, and editing Wikipedia articles. Finally, we will map these instruction activities to the research lifecycle to illustrate our current strategy and identify possibilities for future development.