tag: Undergraduates

Identified as a high-impact practice by the American Association of Colleges and Universities in 2008, undergraduate research, scholarship, or creative activity is known to be especially transformative for underrepresented students, who are likely to face more barriers to participation. While most scholarship and funding of undergraduate research experiences is centered on the sciences, universities are making efforts to provide equivalent experiences for undergraduates in the arts, humanities, and social sciences—especially in the first two years of undergraduate study.

You’ve developed a thoughtful questionnaire, gathered responses, generated meaningful, insightful findings, and now want to share these results to more widely inform decision-making. How do you ensure that these findings are communicated effectively to the right individuals? In spring 2016, Penn State University fielded the Ithaka S+R Undergraduate Student Survey and faced the challenging task of communicating findings from the survey, which covered perspectives from 2,000+ students using 37 libraries across 20 campuses. The Ithaka S+R local surveys, which…

Students are a notoriously difficult population to recruit for surveys. To combat this, Ithaka S+R has developed a number of strategies to encourage participation in our local surveys of undergraduate and graduate/professional students. Crafting effective invitation and reminder messages, determining when to send these messages, and ensuring that your communications are received and opened are all necessary steps in garnering maximum levels of participation from any population. For our local surveys of students specifically, we have found…

How do various stakeholders in higher education believe that research habits can be best developed and supported?  And how important is the role of the library in developing these skills? Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to share findings on these perspectives from Ithaka S+R surveys of students, faculty members, and library directors. In this webinar hosted by NFAIS, I was joined by Lisa Hinchliffe, Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library at the…

To better understand and support undergraduate student needs, the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz contacted Ithaka S+R to run the Undergraduate Student Survey on its campus. Under the leadership of Greg Careaga, Head of Assessment and Planning at the University Library, UCSC ran the survey in spring 2015, and also assisted Ithaka S+R in testing and piloting a new set of questions specifically designed to help academic libraries understand undergraduate perceptions and usage of library…