by Deleyne Wentz, DelWen@ngw.lib.usu.edu

Mitch Stepanovich (LIRT Vice President/President-Elect) chaired the LIRT Midwinter Discussion Forum held on Sunday, January 31st from 9:30-11:00 a.m. at Midwinter ALA.  Those present suggested concerns and challenges for discussion and then divided into six discussion groups: bibliographic instruction for distance education, building instructional teams, marketing bibliographic instruction, assessment, core competencies needed by students, and beyond pushing keys. Due to time constraints, there was no sharing or wrap-up session, but I will re-cap some of the contributions in the lively "Beyond pushing keys: How to teach critical thinking when students would prefer just the mechanics" discussion I attended.

Personal relationship building is key to building the environment for asking questions.  "Reference roving" and asking, "Are you finding what you need?" can lead to a discussion of what the student is hoping to find and the best places to look or how to formulate the query. Engaging the student on the level of using a systematic search strategy, we agreed, was our  goal.  Of course, any reference interview can be used to engage students in critical thinking.  It is important to get students to identify their angle when they propose a topic to research. For example, if a student says she plans to write a paper on child abuse, the librarian can assist her by asking if she is interested in examining it from a sociological, medical, or psychological point of view. 

Knowing the point of view you are coming from is also important when doing research on the Internet, where there are many possibilities for engaging students in critical thinking.  For example, teaching search engine skills can raise questions about how search engines process queries and about which search engine would be most advantageous to use in a given context.  Constructing a search strategy with Boolean operators can involve students, as can evaluation of web sites.  Two interesting analogies were proposed to combat the tendency of students to want to use whatever information they find on the web, even if they
know nothing about its authority.  The first was "overheard in the hall," and the second was "found on the quad."  We can ask students if they would feel comfortable using material in writing a paper that was found in these two locations and when they answer in the negative, we can go on to note that using material from the web without knowing the author or the author's qualifications, is similarly not a good idea.   
 

Deleyne Wentz is Reference Librarian at Utah State University and a member of the LIRT Newsletter committee.