Day 2 - Tuesday, March 17th

The CUNY (City University of New York) Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) has a small group of postdoctoral science students who are primarily onsite for lab work. I was asked to develop a series of library workshops that would appeal to both the ASRC students, and the more traditional grad students at the Graduate Center (GC) main campus. Developing seminars that appeal to users as both students and as researchers simultaneously have been a rewarding challenge. I will discuss how I developed and modified these topics over the course of one semester for two different audiences, as well as the challenges in communication and outreach that I am facing. I didn't know how different my two constituencies were when I committed to the topics my workshops would be covering. By that time, I had to come up with ways to tweak the content of each section to appeal to the respective groups, and had to communicate to the two different groups just how useful the workshops could be to them. For example, for a workshop on open access, for the graduate students I highlighted how they can find author archived copies of journal articles that they might not otherwise have access to, while for the student researchers, I emphasized how they can use OA platforms to make their own work more visible, thus potentially increasing their readership.

In an effort to strengthen the academic and career preparedness of graduate students at their public land grant university, library faculty organized a one-day boot camp, featuring workshops focused on research and scholarly productivity skills. Organizers of the boot camp recognized that the needs of their graduate students extended beyond the discipline-specific curricula of graduate programs and the content of library orientations and one-shots. The workshop series they developed, informed by input from graduate students, focused on skills and strategies needed throughout the research lifecycle. Graduate student response to the weekend boot camp was overwhelmingly positive, and attendance has grown with each iteration, from 56 attendees at the inaugural boot camp in February 2019 to 117 graduate students at the most recent event in September 2019.

The panel presentation will be structured as follows. First, panel members will report on two research studies they conducted to understand the role of the boot camps in addressing the research needs of graduate students. The first study looked at feedback from students who attended the boot camps. Student responses were collected via paper forms and a follow-up Qualtrics survey. Panel presenters coded and analyzed responses to open-ended questions to develop themes that were unique to specific boot camps as well as themes that appeared across multiple boot camps. A second research study, conducted in fall 2019, featured one hour, in-depth interviews of five boot camp participants. The study explored the perspectives of two subgroups of interest: international graduate students (n=3) and non-traditional graduate students (n=2). The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed to develop themes and patterns in participants’ responses to semi-structured questions about (a) challenges the participants faced in conducting research, (b) skills they believed were needed to address these challenges, and (c) preferred methods or venues for acquiring these skills.

In the second part of the presentation, panel members will share strategies for implementing a workshop series based on lessons learned from their research and experiences with their own boot camps. The final part of the presentation will report on steps taken by boot camp organizers to establish partnerships with the library’s Media & Digital Resources Lab and the University’s Graduate School, Graduate Student Council, Office of University Writing, and Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. These campus partnerships were instrumental in extending the scope and content of the workshops offered.

Literature reviews are the source of constant stress among doctoral and master level students and, at the same time, the most popular assignment among instructors. After teaching numerous workshops, webinars, Literature Review Bootcamps, and co-teaching “literature review modules,” I decided to create an interactive web-based learning tool, the Literature Review Design (LRD).

You are welcome to use it before the workshop. Access URL:http://libguides.kennesaw.edu/LRDesign

During this workshop, I will share with you the information about the tool and demonstrate how it was used as a complementary learning aid to scaffold instruction and within the KSU Interactive Research Method Lab. You will also have a chance to go through 9 steps of designing and conducting a literature review. I expect a lively discussion afterward and constructive feedback! Participants will receive an email with a pdf document with a visual representation of the work done.

The tool helps students to build a visual representation of the conceptual framework emerging from critical readings, to narrow down research topics, develop research questions, and pursue other literature review objectives. It also might help researchers in creating non-traditional types of literature reviews such as systematic, scoping, integrative, meta-synthesis, and meta-analysis. The interactive tool help students to change their perception of the role, genre, and methodology behind the scientific literature review and make the process of reviewing literature similar to research.

References and Links to tools:

Literature Review Design tutorial: http://libguides.kennesaw.edu/LRDesign

Interactive Research Methods Lab http://libguides.kennesaw.edu/IRML

Graduate students, both through in-class assignments and in their work on their theses and dissertations, are expected not to just find sources on their topics, but to read deeply and fully understand the conversation(s) in the literature around their topics. They are expected to participate in those conversations. Oftentimes, however, graduate students are still getting comfortable with the literature in their discipline(s). A variety of subtleties, idiosyncracies, “pro-tips”, “life hacks”, etc., related to interacting with the literature could be extremely valuable to graduate students, but are sometimes so intuitive to graduate teaching faculty that they go unsaid. Graduate teaching librarians can play a crucial role in making some of this “insider” knowledge explicit.

The intention of this workshop is to discuss specific lesson plans and learning activities for facilitating a greater level of comfort in navigating discipline-specific literature. The facilitator will discuss some examples of lesson plans and learning activities used on his campus, including strategies:

• To help students organize their thinking about the important points from various sources to facilitate synthesis (e.g., the literature review matrix or other similar methods)

• To facilitate students’ interrogation of published works:

• How do the authors use the sources they incorporate into the published work?

• What does the references page tell you about the conversation around this topic?

• What information in the source could you use to locate more sources on the same or a similar topic?

The 90-minute Workshop session format has been discussed in the lead-up to the conference as “train-the-trainer”-type sessions, but the emphasis of this session, however, will be for participants to share and collaboratively develop ideas for lesson plans and learning activities. Individual tables or areas in the room will be devoted to individual disciplines, and attendees will make a plan to engage students based on a provided scenario or assignment.

Graduate student orientation is a time filled with a fire hose of information coming at students transitioning to new communities, new studies and trying to keep it all under control. In partnership with subject-area librarians and the graduate school administration, My colleague Mark Robison (Political Science, Global Affairs) and I are designing a first-year graduate student outreach program that will connect incoming graduate students with their subject librarians to learn resources the Hesburgh Libraries offer along with the services they may not know are available.

At Duke University there is a requirement for all graduate students to take a number of credits in courses called Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). While faculty and staff members can be approved to teach these two hour workshops, librarians at Duke have in the last few years proposed several that cross disciplinary boundaries, such as the workshop on retractions in the science and social scientific literature as well as more discipline focused, such as Scholarly Publishing in East Asian Studies.

For our presentation we would like to focus on developing, delivering and evolving the RCR courses on data management. These workshops focus on educating graduate students on best practices on pre-project planning, active workflow design and organization, storage and backup strategies, publishing data via repositories, preparing data for sharing, and strategies for integrating reproducible research practices.

We have taken an iterative approach to the development of these workshops over the past three years. While these workshops began being targeted on high-level topics, our Data Management 101 courses have evolved to become more inclusive of cross-disciplinary data, such as images, textual corpuses and social science data inclusive of mixed methodological data. Our presentation at the conference will trace the life cycle of changes across the early and present versions of these RCR courses and preview upcoming changes to the elements of the course.

As Health Sciences Libraries evolve, the support they offer graduate students has evolved to incorporate many aspects of the research life cycle. At Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, we have partnered with the Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research to offer training workshops for graduate students who are interested in using bioinformatics to plan, analyze, or execute scientific experiments. We offer two series: 1) an 8-week, 1-hour per week seminar series providing a general overview of available techniques and 2) a week-long intensive, two hours per session, series on utilizing free databases from the National Center for Biotechnology and Information (NCBI). Workshops have been offered for four years; a consistent challenge has been the variety of experience of participants, particularly in their biological science content background. To address this challenge and provide a solid foundation for the series, in 2019 we conducted a basic genetics session prior to engaging with the NCBI databases. In this lesson, we introduced participants to the central dogma of biology and utilized that knowledge in active learning sessions, with the goal of a shared understanding of the biological processes of transcription and translation. This understanding is essential to effectively using the gene and protein databases to interpret data and plan experiments. In addition to laying a solid content foundation, these activities set the stage for an interactive series and allowed participants to feel comfortable with the content and with interacting with each other. Feedback for the sessions was largely positive with 86% of survey respondents indicating enjoying the genetics portion specifically. The activities utilized open access learning materials and could be adapted for bioinformatic workshops at other institutions.