ED 653 Assignment: Enduring Understandings

See original post with comments on the ED 653 Course Website.

Assignment:

“Your homework assignment for this week is to prioritize content and identify enduring understandings for the learning module you’re developing. In subsequent weeks, you’ll map a plan to help students reach understanding… Write three enduring understandings for your topic. Include a preface paragraph that briefly describes your topic and your student audience (age, prior experience).”

My Post:

For this class, I will be working on a unit within the LS 101 course taught each semester at University of Alaska Anchorage. Entitled “Library Resources and Information Retrieval,” this one-credit online elective course draws in adult students with varying skills and experience, in terms of library (or any other) research and technology. Students  tend to range from undergraduate freshman to seniors and, though all will have completed some research in the past (though it may be at a high school level or even decades prior), the majority are unfamiliar with using academic library resources for college-level research assignments. I am focusing on the unit within the course that introduces article databases by exploring the general-purpose database Academic Search Premier. Though I am developing content specifically for inclusion in this course, it is possible that individual modules would be made openly available on the library website for any patron to access.

In planning for this unit, I will focus on the following enduring understandings.

  • Students should understand that carefully formulating a search string is essential for performing a successful search.
  • Students should understand that evaluating their search results and adjusting the searches accordingly (terms used, Boolean operators, limits applied, etc.) is key to finding the articles they need.
  • Students should understand that the basic concepts of searching Academic Search Premier can be applied to searching in all (virtually all?) other library databases, even when interface appearances, features, and wording are very different.*

*Note that this understanding is likely to develop over the course of the semester as the student is exposed to the library catalog, Academic Search Premier, and a specialized article database that corresponds with their chosen topic.

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