When we were first contemplating the undertaking that became the Ready for Success project, we did what any academic librarian would do: a literature search.
Not surprisingly, there is no lack of published research on our chosen topic, namely the research skills that students take with them from high school into college. We had a lot of experience working with students at Stony Brook and we had seen what aspects of the research process they found most challenging. We wondered what their foundational knowledge. How had their high school teachers and librarians presented the range of skills and mindsets that go into what is often called “information literacy?” We were also looking for evidence of high school/college collaborations or partnerships across this “information literacy gap.”
What we found was varied and extensive. This post is not a full blown lit review but more a chance to point out a few highlights of the research we dipped into.
There are a number of studies that look at the research skills of first year college students as well as the types of research they encounter in college classes. One interesting approach to the problem looked at the assignments on class syllabi to see what professors expected of new students (Donham 2019).
Our keynote speaker, Brenda Boyer, is involved in a study out of Rutgers University looking at college students and the preparation they received in high school (Boyer & Dziedzic-Elliot 2023).
Since we knew we wanted to work with high school librarians and classroom teachers, we were interested in learning more about how they collaborated. Sarah Crary’s surveys of teachers and librarians looked at each group’s perception of the other when it came to research instruction (2019).
We also came across many case studies of successful high school teacher/librarian partnerships, ranging from librarians embedded in honors-level classes (Hamilton 2012) to shared professional development workshops (Montiel-Overal 2010).
All of this research helped inform the approach we took with our grant partners at Brentwood High School and the activities we designed over the span of the grant. We’ll be talking more in-depth about the experience and possible implications for high school research instruction at our March 15th summit at Stony Brook University (still time to register!).
And if you like research as much as we do, we thought we’d share the bibliography we compiled and continue to maintain. We’ve linked to the open source full text where available.