Heather M. Leary

Teaching Use of Digital Primary Sources for K-12 Settings

Anne R. Diekema et al. — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:37:53 PDT

This paper describes learning outcomes of a three-day workshop on integrating primary sources into K-12 teaching. The short curriculum — intended for teams of teachers and school librarians — combined visits to a museum and a library's special collections with an introduction to significant national and local digital collections of primary sources. The paper draws on focus group data, reflection papers, and a conference presentation by the workshop participants as well as curricular artifacts presented to the workshop instructors. Using their workshop experience, teachers integrated digitized primary sources into their curricula thereby creating quality instructional content that engaged students' interest. School librarians and teachers worked together during the workshop, establishing a model for future collaboration. They were exposed to readily accessible digital sources they can draw upon for scholastic projects and lifelong learning. Primary source sets created by workshop participants were added to local and national educational websites for others to use.

Connecting People with Online Resources: The Instructional Architect (PBL)

Mimi Recker et al. — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:37:51 PDT

The National Science Foundation (nsf.gov) has funded a large initiative to catalog collections of high-quality online resources into the National Science Digital Library (nsdl.org). The mission of the NSDL is to help improve education for all teachers and students.

The purpose of this module is to help you find high-quality online resources, learn strategies for incorporating them into a free software tool called the Instructional Architect, and use these projects in an instructional situation.

In this module, you will learn to access online resources and to use tools to help solve instructional or learning problems or issues that you currently face in your classroom. You will also learn about reviewing IA projects to help you in choosing projects you can reuse and in designing your own.

Connecting People with Online Resources: The Instructional Architect (Technology)

Mimi Recker et al. — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:37:48 PDT

Modeling Teacher Ratings of Online Resources: A Human-Machine Approach to Quality

Mimi Recker et al. — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:41:28 PST

In education, the scalable deployment of media-rich online resources supports peer production in ways that promise to radically transform teaching and learning (CRA, 2005; Pea et al., 2008). Online educational repositories such as the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE.org) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL.org) collect and curate online learning resources created for a wide range of educational audiences and subject areas (McArthur & Zia, 2008). Through a simple, web-based authoring tool, called the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu) teachers locate and share educational resources and activities in an IA project. These IA projects can then be viewed, copied, and adapted by other IA users, in ways that support innovative teacher peer production. A vexing problem for such initiatives remains the elusive notion of quality. In peer production environments, how does one identify quality online content? Moreover, how does one do so in sustainable, cost-effective, and scalable ways? Previous work (Bethard, et al, 2009) presented an innovative approach for using machine learning models to automatically assess the quality and pedagogic utility of educational digital library resources. They demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of automatic quality assessments for a single STEM domain and audience-level: high school Earth science. This work reports recent efforts to extend these models to support a broader range of STEM topics and grade levels, specifically applied to IA projects and compared model outputs to quality assessments made by K-12 teachers. Since the nature of the resources being compared in the IA (peer) versus DLESE (expert) are different, results of this study provide insights on the generalizability of this machine learning approach and its potential for facilitating teacher peer production.

Expert versus Novice Tutors: Impacts on student outcomes in problem based learning

Heather Leary et al. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:50:42 PDT

Problem based learning (PBL) is well known for the large amount of literature in Medical Education (Savery & Duffy, 1995). An essential part of PBL is the role of the tutor. With inconsistencies in the definition of an effective tutor, a systematic review of the literature in all disciplines is necessary. Meta-analysis (Cooper & Hedges, 1994) was used to investigate both content expertise and facilitator training of PBL tutors as moderators of student learning outcomes.

Integrating an OpenCourseWare and Institutional Repository

Heather Leary et al. — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:37:22 PDT

This presentation was given at the 2009 Open Education Conference in Vancouver, BC. It shows how and why Utah State University chose to archive their OpenCourseWare. This was done in their Institutional Repository, DigitalCommons@USU. The presentation emphasizes the importance of the Open Education community to work with Librarians.

Instructional Architect Teacher Professional Development Handouts

Mimi Recker et al. — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:37:22 PDT

Three handouts for the teacher professional development workshops on the Instructional Architect (IA). Starting spring 2009 the face-to-face workshop was changed to be three different days of learning about how to use the IA, inquiry based and problem based learning, evaluation of IA projects with a rubric, and creating IA projects.

Teaching Information Literacy with Authentic Problems: Creating and Using an Online Module

Heather Leary et al. — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:08:23 PDT

The American Library Association defines information literacy as a “set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.” Students in an academic setting need to learn how to learn about all kinds of information. Committed to finding innovative ways to teach students information literacy skills, Utah State University’s Library Instruction Program created a free online course to teach these skills. This presentation will explain the course, why and how it was created, the problem based approach using authentic scenarios, the value it adds to library instruction, and how it can be integrated into a curriculum.

Podcasting Folklore

Randy Williams et al. — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:08:23 PDT

Presentation on podcasting folklore given at the Utah Library Association annual meeting in Sandy, Utah. The presentation gives a general background on podcasting and folklore, the process of creating podcasts and delivering the podcasts on the web.

Instructional Architect

Mimi Recker et al. — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:07:24 PDT

Developing a Review Rubric for Learning Resources in Digital Libraries

Heather Leary et al. — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:21:13 PDT

This paper describes the development of a review rubric for learning resources in the context of the Instructional Architect (IA), a web-based authoring tool. We describe the motivation for developing a review rubric, the process for creating it by synthesizing the rubrics of other education-related digital libraries, and the results of testing the rubric with teachers. Analysis of usability and reliability indicates that the review rubric influences how teachers design online learning resources.

IA Review Rubric

Sarah Giersch et al. — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:21:12 PDT

This is a review rubric geared for the projects in the Instructional Architect. It is used for assessing the quality of the projects created.

Expert Versus Novice Tutors: Impacts on Student Outcomes in Problem-Based Learning

Heather M. Leary et al. — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:17:54 PDT

The tutor is an essential part of problem based learning (PBL). However, tutor characteristics and role are inconsistent. Meta-analysis was used to investigate both the role and training of PBL tutors as moderators of student learning. Weighted effect sizes were calculated on student outcomes with a modest favorable overall effect size for PBL; a vote count shows favorable results as well. Results indicate a mixture of peers and instructors do best when compared to peers and instructors alone. Tutor training appears to make a difference by itself, but when considered with tutor background, tutor training does not appear to moderate student learning. A framework for study factors and recommendations for future work are provided.

A Problem Based Learning Meta Analysis: Differences Across Problem Types, Implementation Types, Disciplines, and Assessment Levels

Andrew Walker et al. — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:17:54 PDT

Problem based learning (PBL) in its most current form originated in Medical Education but has since been used in a variety of disciplines (Savery & Duffy, 1995) at a variety of educational levels (Savery, 2006). Although recent meta analyses have been conducted (Dochy, Segers, Van den Bossche, & Gijbels, 2003; Gijbels, Dochy, Van den Bossche, & Segers, 2005) that attempted to go beyond medical education, they found only one study in economics and were unable to explain large portions of the variance across results. This work builds upon their efforts as a meta-analysis that crosses disciplines as well as categorizes the types of problems used (Jonassen, 2000), the PBL approach employed (Barrows, 1986), and the level of assessment (Gijbels et al., 2005; Sugrue, 1993, 1995). Across 82 studies and 201 outcomes the findings favor PBL (d = 0.13, +/- .025) with a lack of homogeneity (Q = 954.27) that warrants a closer examination of moderating factors.

Assessing the Quality of Doctoral Dissertation Literature Reviews in Instructional Technology

M. Harrison Fitt et al. — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:17:53 PDT

Assessment of the doctoral dissertation literature review provides insight into a student’s preparation for future work as a researcher. In 2004, efforts to assess the quality of literature reviews in doctoral dissertations were pioneered by Boote & Beile. Their work represents an important response to the call for improved research skills among emerging scholars. The purpose of this study is to replicate their work in a focused area of educational research, specifically Instructional Technology, and to examine the inter-rater reliability of the rubric. The findings suggest that dissertation literature reviews in Instructional Technology show the same need for improvement as dissertation literature reviews from education as a whole. Potential avenues of research are identified as well as improvements for rubric.

Information Literacy: Finding and Using Information, January 2009

Anne Diekema et al. — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:17:53 PDT

This course is for learning information literacy skills, especially those related to using an academic library and the Internet for college-level research. The course uses a modified problem-based learning approach to give you an authentic and hands-on experience with the subject matter. The purpose of this course is to help you learn about information, the tools that can be used to find, evaluate, and share it, and to practice the skills you have learned.

It is designed for students and teachers in higher education, but can be modified easily for other learners. The course assumes basic Internet capabilities (browser navigation and using search engines).