To
develop information literacy skills in chemistry and biochemistry
majors at a primarily undergraduate institution, a multiyear collaboration
between chemistry faculty and librarians has resulted in the establishment
of a semester-long capstone project for Organic Chemistry II. Information
literacy skills were instilled via a progressive research report,
supported by a comprehensive modular virtual tutorial catered toward
Rider University students, on the efficient use of SciFinder and related tasks for searching and using the primary literature.
Over a six-year period, both the research report and the tutorial
modules have been cyclically evaluated, assessed, and revised in order
to meet our student learning objectives. This article describes the
assessment-driven evolution of the research report assignment between
2010 and 2015, as well as student perceptions and learning outcomes.
The technological development, feedback-driven revisions, and assessment
of student learning outcomes of the SciFinder tutorial
series have been included in a companion article in this Journal.
The impetus to incorporate instruction on the efficient and responsible practice of chemical information literacy into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum has become exceptionally urgent. At Rider University, Chemical Information Instruction (CII) has accordingly evolved from face-to-face sessions into online modules to embed information literacy skills into an Organic Chemistry II course. Through multiple methods of evaluation and assessment of student learning, the e-tutorial grew from a series of seven modules narrated by the science librarian, hosted on the University Libraries intranet, and created with labor intensive e-learning authoring software, into a series of 14 modules complete with detailed storyboards, narrated by the Organic Chemistry professor, hosted freely on the Internet, and created with simpler user-friendly software. This article describes the technological development, feedback-driven revisions, and assessment of student learning outcomes of this virtual tutorial series, while a companion article in this Journal addresses the execution and assessment of an accompanying capstone research report.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.