1,720,962 research outputs found
An intervention and assessment to Improve information literacy
No full textPurpose: The goal of the study was to test an intervention using a brief essay as an instrument for evaluating higher-order information literacy skills in college students, while accounting for prior conditions such as socioeconomic status and prior academic achievement, and identify other predictors of information literacy through an evaluation of student behavior and attitude. Design/Methods/Approach: An instructional intervention was evaluated using a brief essay as a pre- and posttest of learning in a course in technical communication. Multiple readers rated essays on five criteria to measure higher-order skills. Interrater reliability and internal consistency of the measures were tested. Analyses of variance and covariance were used to measure academic gains and to partial out the effects of confounding variables. Student behavior was measured by level of activity in the course management system and essay length. Student attitude was measured through a content analysis of their reflective statements. A control group of students who took the same course without the intervention, but who did not take the pretest, also took the posttest. Findings: 1) The method used for measuring information literacy was found to be reliable and valid. 2) The use of the brief essay as a pre- and posttest showed that the students in the treatment group achieved impressive gains in higher-order skills associated with information literacy. 3) The students in the treatment group significantly outperformed students in the control group with substantive effect sizes explaining results. 4) Socioeconomic status had no significant impact on information literacy. 5) Student use of online instructional materials had no significant impact on information literacy. Originality/Value: A model of information literacy assessment in higher education was proposed to isolate important classes of variables affecting learning. An experimental design using multivariate methods to account for the multiple influences of variables on information literacy allowed for the determination and partitioning of the influence of each variable and sets of variables. This knowledge allows for efficient and systematic progress to be recorded where less productive variables can be dropped from the model and significant and important variables are kept in the model to increase the amount of variability explained in information literacy outcomes.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Davida Schar
Continuing the Conversation: Questions about the Framework
No full textThis essay raises questions about the future of information literacy in higher education, given the prevalence of the Information Literacy Competency Standards in the library profession for the past 15 years, and the heated debate that took place regarding whether the Framework for Information Literacy and the Standards could harmoniously co-exist. We do not have answers to these questions, but we offer our perspectives on how the Standards have served academic librarians in the past and on how we envision the Framework and the Standards working together to further information literacy instruction. Our conclusion is that the Framework and the Standards serve different purposes and have different intended audiences and are thus both valuable to the profession
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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