Tag: research

by Meagan Fowler, Assistant Professor/Librarian
Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland, Ohio

To bring attention to the research that is being conducted in and about community college libraries, in this sponsored post the ACRL CJCLS Scholarly Research Committee would like to highlight research conducted by researchers at Florida State University and the University at Buffalo that was published this past July in College & Research Libraries.

In their article, “Community College Student’s Perceptions of Their Information Literacy Needs,” Latham et al. (2022) set out to explore community college students’ self-perception of their information literacy (IL) needs. Spurred by the paucity of existing research on community college libraries and IL, their research was guided by three research questions:

RQ1. What are the self-perceptions of students concerning their IL needs?

RQ2. Do students’ self-perceptions of their IL needs vary based on their educational and career goals?

RQ3. Do students’ self-perceptions of their IL needs vary based on the type of instruction they received (skills-based vs. threshold concepts)?

Latham et al. (2022) conducted semi-structured interviews with thirty-four students at five community colleges in Florida and New York and found that while students did value IL and understood its importance in their academic, personal, and professional lives, how they applied IL varied depending on the context of the information need (i.e., the sources that they considered acceptable for their personal work may be “good enough” for their academic work). Further information also emerged on the topic of students’ beliefs about their future careers and the applicability of IL and their perception of IL as a set of skills as opposed to threshold concepts.

You are encouraged to read the full article for a detailed review of the findings, interview questions, and implications for future research.

For further information on this research, the researchers can be contacted at: Don Latham (dlatham@fsu.edu), Melissa Gross (mgross@fsu.edu), and Heidi Julien (heidijul@buffalo.edu).

Reference

Welcome to the Research Skills Corner, a sponsored post by the ACRL CJCLS Scholarly Research Committee. 

We plan to be here monthly to provide:

• Highlights of recent research articles written by community college librarians and articles written about the issues that pertain to our libraries.
• Tools, trainings and a spotlight on ways to grow your own research capacity.
• A place for conversation in the comments section.
• Thoughtful and salient opinions (we hope!).

Conducting research can be difficult in a community/vocational/technical/junior college. We often do not have staff tasked with research explicitly or tied to our promotion or tenure process directly. And it is critical that this research is conducted on us and with us. Our institutions frequently have higher numbers of first gen students, diverse and historically underrepresented students as well as PELL grant recipients, veterans and more. Our students are our strengths and while there are similarities to the demographic makeup of students in R1s, our populations are not identical. How do those differences impact the applicability of student success research done at R1s to our institutions?

How can we provide service to our students and our institutions through research? How can we help each other grow our research capacities? One thing we can do is collaborate with each other across institutions on topics we are most curious about. Our committee recently hosted a network and brainstorming session around ways to collaborate around potential research interests. A few people attended and the conversation generated turned out to be very valuable for future work opportunities. Would these informal conversations and community building sessions be something that could be useful if held more frequently such as several times a year? Alternately, is LibParlor a growing channel for this discovery of collaborative opportunities? How can we tap into the work of other existing ALA committees that focus on growing research capacity? All the questions.

Please let us know if there are any topics/papers/tools that you would like to see featured in this column. Did you publish something recently? Drop us a note below!