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Each of the CIL tests has an online tutorial and a practice test so you can really test your CIL skills before taking the actual tests. Some students prefer to just come take the tests, and if they don't pass, they can see in which areas they did poorly, so they know what they need to study on the tutorials. You can also come in to one of our Tuesday or Thursday night Short Courses and have a CIL Technician review one of the tutorials with you.

The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Astonishingly, the test showed that their introductory courses had taught them “next to nothing,”

“They had a bag of tricks, formulas to apply. But that was solving problems by rote. They floundered on the simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”

More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur—and this is the crux of the method. You’re a student and you’ve only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it’s not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces.”

This paper reports on the results of a qualitative research project that investigates how students use subject guides, and what students like and dislike about subject guides.

Culture -- in higher education, and in our society -- is at the heart of the matter.

We have reduced K-12 schooling to basic skill acquisition that effectively leaves most students underprepared for college-level learning. We have bastardized the bachelor’s degree by allowing it to morph into a ticket to a job (though, today, that ticket often doesn’t get you very far). The academy has adopted an increasingly consumer-based ethic that has produced costly and dangerous effects: the expectations and standards of a rigorous liberal education have been displaced by thinly disguised professional or job training curriculums; teaching and learning have been devalued, deprioritized, and replaced by an emphasis on magazine rankings; and increased enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, and more research grants have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision-making.

The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.

In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop.

Such approaches would demand much more of students and faculty. Students should be made to grapple with the material and receive authentic and explicit practice in thinking like an expert, Mr. Wieman said. Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information.

Higher education once was immune, he said, until the spread of online learning, which will allow lower-cost providers to extend into the higher reaches of the marketplace. "Higher education," he said, "is vulnerable to disruption." And, while students are changing, several speakers described conventional teaching approaches as being ineffective.

Fry, Amy, and Linda Rich. 2011. Usability testing for e-resource discovery: How students find and choose e-resources using library websites. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37, no.5: 386-401.

Articles Copyright: Regulation Out of Line with our Digital Reality? PDF Abigail J. McDermott 7-20 Library Use of Web-based Research Guides PDF Jimmy Ghaphery, Erin White 21-31 Investigations into Library Web-Scale Discovery Services PDF Jason Vaughan 32-82 Usability Test Results for a Discovery Tool in an Academic Library PDF Jody Condit Fagan, Meris A. Mandernach, Carl S. Nelson, Jonathan R. Paulo, Grover Saunders