The Embedded Librarian Model in Traditional vs. Online Political Science Courses

Abstract

This paper, prepared for the 2023 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, compares the effectiveness of the embedded librarian model for promoting the development of information literacy skills in in-person versus online courses. Specifically, this paper leverages variation in the delivery modality of an upper-level, writing-intensive Political Science course in which the authors collaborated to implement the embedded librarian model in fall 2019 (in-person modality) and fall 2020 (online modality). In brief, we find that student research papers submitted in the in-person section of the course scored significantly higher on multiple indicators of information literacy than papers submitted for the online version.