Our contribution aims to summarise the results of evaluating information literacy instruction focusing on plagiarism prevention and appropriate work with scientific information sources using the HUMAN framework. A team from Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt presented this frameworkat ECIL 2021 (Baldarelli et al., 2022) as a tool for developing the information literacy competencies of German engineering students. We followed up on this initiative by further adapting the framework to the context of healthcare studies in a Czech university.
Czech law mandates that midwives and paramedics receive a bachelor’s degree to perform their work (Act on non-medical health professions, 2004). This entails a requirement to master academic writing, including proper use of information sources. However, these claims usually do not meet the interests and expectations of healthcare students, who are rather practically oriented and, hence, consider the requirement of these academic competencies unjustified. In this situation, we were looking for a way to convince them that it is necessary to address this problem by adopting a different perspective. The HUMAN framework, which had been previously successfully piloted with similarly practically oriented engineering students (Baldarelli et al., 2022) and in a practical-oriented international management course (Trefer, 2022), provided us with such a solution.
In cooperation with the framework’s authors, we created self-study materials (including a video presentation), exercises (consisting of categorisation of the sources used in a preselected scientific article), and a workshop using the HUMAN framework. We subsequently tested and evaluated the materials in class with 27 students of midwifery and emergency medical services study programs. To improve the reliability of the research, we used a combination of research methods: an analysis of students’ outputs from the exercise and a self-assessment questionnaire.
The effect of the teaching method proved to be considerable. Before the lesson, more than half of the students assessed their ability to work with sources as poor or very poor. While after completing, all but one rated their ability as rather good or somewhat good (the average increase was 1.3 steps on a five-point scale). The evaluation of the framework as a teaching method showed that the students appreciated the video presentation but would welcome more examples of the application on specific scientific texts. Another finding highlighted the importance of choosing an appropriate article for student assessment. The analysis of the students’ outputs showed that the findability and availability of full texts of the sources cited in the assessed article played an essential role in their correct categorisation according to the HUMAN framework.
References
- Act on non-medical health professions, nr. 96/2004 (2004). Retrieved from https://www.zakonyprolidi.cz/cs/2004-96
- Baldarelli, B., Trescher, K., Treffer, A., & Jakobs, L. (2022). Learning how to avoid plagiarism: A new approach in information literacy sessions for computer science and engineering students. In S. Kurbanoğlu, S., Špiranec, S., Ünal, Y., Boustany, J., Kos, D. (Eds.), Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era, The Seventh European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2021, online, September 20-23, 2021: Revised Selected Papers. Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) 1533. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99885-1_45
- Treffer, A. (2022). Design digitaler Lernmedien zur Quellenkompetenzvermittlung. [Unpublished master thesis]. Brandenburg: University of applied Science.
Pavla Vizváry1, Kristýna Kalmárová2, Beatrice Baldarelli3
1Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic; 2Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia; 3Library of the University of Applied Sciences Ingolstadt, Germany
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