I let this blog go dormant for a while – partly because I was busy, partly because I just didn’t have any good ideas to write about. But, Eamon Tewell recently tweeted a request for ideas for info lit lessons that don’t need students to have computers available:

I responded with a 2-tweet description of a lesson I do, but thought it would be nice to have a fuller description I could just link to for those who find such things useful. Maybe this will become a regular thing, describing individual lessons I find useful, maybe this will be a one-off. Time will tell!

Why do scholarly journal articles matter?

I developed the lesson I’m describing today for use in the first of two sessions that I do for a 3000-level course that is required of all sociology majors in the first semester after they declare that major. The class sessions are 75 min long. I’ve also adapted it to use in the credit-bearing info lit course that I teach, but those sessions are only 50 min, so I have to break it up a bit there.

One of the big concerns faculty have at this point is related to getting students to use “appropriate” sources for their papers. But how often do faculty spend time explaining why they prefer scholarly journal articles over other types of sources? After all, identifying “appropriate” sources is not always intuitive for those new to academic discourse.

So, for the first of the two sessions I do with this class, we spend the time focusing on that – what scholarly journal articles even are, and what details you can get from a scholarly journal article that are generally left out of other types of sources. Of course, using a critical perspective, the focus is on the information related to a specific purpose, not on scholarly sources being inherently better than other types.

I start the session by showing the “Scientific Studies” episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. I try to remember to offer a disclaimer that it does include some off-color jokes, but the critiques he includes make it worth it. I definitely cut it off before the little skit at the very end, but am not always consistent about exactly where I cut it off, and sometimes adjust for the sake of time.

After showing this, I lead a discussion of the issues he raises – the ways researchers can manipulate statistics, spurious correlations, the effect of sample size, the ways “publish or perish” can bias the scientific record, as well as how popular media often simplifies and sensationalizes research results. Throughout this discussion, I refer back to the scholarly v popular distinction regularly, highlighting the value in searching less-than-intuitive systems to find scholarly journal articles, then slog through the long boring text, to get the details you need to evaluate the sample size, the research methodology, etc.

I don’t have a strict timeline, adjusting for how the discussion goes, but no later than around 35-40 min into the class, I shift to a new activity: I ask students to work in pairs, and hand out a worksheet to each person and a set of articles to each pair. Here is a link to view the worksheet as a google document (view only, but if you find it useful you should be able to make a copy). For the articles, I give each pair one scholarly journal article (of course, for a sociology class, I use an article from a sociology journal!) and a popular write-up of that article. For the set I have now, I found 3 separate popular articles, so different groups get different commentary on the shared scholarly article, to kind of highlight that not all summaries are equal. This can be an interesting way to bring trade journals into the discussion, if appropriate to your topic.

And then, I give students time to work through these. Sometimes, there’s a natural cut-off, where most students are close enough to done that it makes sense to shift to discussion time again. Sometimes, I start going over it earlier, because I like to make sure we have about 15 min for the wrap-up discussion… At which point we go through the worksheet questions to highlight the characteristics of a scholarly journal article.

This lesson obviously requires a projector and speakers, but is best done in a classroom that does not include big computers at the students’ desks. These sessions usually go really well, and are not as dependent as some lessons on where exactly students are in the research process. For this class, since they usually have a research project they have to find sources for, they come to a library classroom for the second session, during which I introduce them to the subject-specific databases. But, that may be a week or a month after the first session! This lesson could also be adapted to be a stand-alone lesson to get students thinking about how to understand when they need to slog through a scholarly journal article instead of just an easier summary of it.