This instruction session was created to support a Women and Gender Studies assignment that includes a 5-6 page paper on a topic related to race, sex, and gender and two annotated bibliographic citations of 100 words or less.

The activity is used with "one shot" instruction sessions at the beginning of class. The activity is set up on tables and students begin as soon as they enter the class. This signals to the student that this will be an active learning class. The activity is referred back to later in the class at the appropriate time. Activity could be used at any point during class.

We offered this as a standalone workshop, and invited instructors in our writing program to offer extra credit to students who attended. We’ve also adapted the workshop for public library and community settings. The workshop generally takes about an hour and could easily be used in one-shot library instruction.

This exercise was implemented in a first-year seminar course after the 20 students had engaged in activities and discussion about the information cycle and scholarly sources (peer review, scholarly conversation, "the literature"). It was followed by a unit on "information privilege" and finally by a group research project.

One-shot library instruction. This exercise is a "warm up" for the Wikipedia edit-a-thon co-sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Department. http://librarynews.lmu.edu/2017/03/wikipedia-edit-thon-gender-race-sexua...

We were given a one hour slot during our university's annual Senior Summit. We had to collaborate with our Center for Career Development to do this.

This assignment was used two days after the election. It was designed as a non-partisan examination of Digital Politics and the power/limitations of Twitter.

This lesson took place in a sociology research methods course (created with Mary-Michelle Moore). Students were familiar with basic database searching techniques and were getting ready to do their own literature reviews on a sociology topic of their choosing followed by some assignments using SPSS to analyze existing data sets.

After a quick review on finding peer-reviewed journal articles, the librarian asks students "Where does data come from?" to talk about data sources.
Then students split into small groups to explore an article and its accompanying data set in Google Forms. (We have access to ICPSR so the questions ask students about an article that uses a dataset from ICPSR but FigShare or freely available sources could also be used).
After students complete the Google form the librarian pulls the class back together to discuss the answers.
The librarian also pulls up the codebook, questionnaire, and talks about the ways different researchers approach the same data set to answer their research questions.

Students struggle most with "what makes a data set trustworthy." They tended to focus on external indicators such as it's used in peer-reviewed articles, funders, and who the authors are. We also tried to emphasize the quality of the data itself as an indicator (completeness, sample size, questions asked, documentation, etc.).

Then students search for data sets on their research topics as well as other peer-reviewed articles through citation chaining in ICPSR.

This activity was designed for Health Sciences 322, Global Health, at Gettysburg College, and was first used in Fall 2015. That semester, the class enrolled 18 undergraduate students (mostly juniors and seniors) and met for a 75-minute class period.