Faculty and Staff

Take a journey to discover how you can provide quality information to your patrons for free! Explore the world of Open Access Resources! Open Access refers to scholarly information that is free, online, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This makes it easier for people to find and use reliable information on a myriad of subjects, such as health information, educational materials, or business resources. Knowledge of Open Access is important for all librarians to help us best serve our communities and stretch our dwindling budgets. Your tour guides will give an overview of Open Access, discuss legislative issues, demonstrate how to find open access resources, and explain how librarians can get involved.

Presented at the SDLA/NDLA/MPLA Tri-conference 2013

Objective: to explore currently available Open Educational Resources related to Health Sciences programs to increase available options for free, high quality, online educational materials to support Health Sciences faculty, researchers, and students in online, hybrid, and in-person courses at Arizona State University.

Background/Methods: Following the successful Open Access movement, the Open Education movement is expanding free, online access to Open Educational Resources (OERs), beyond research published in scholarly journals. Similar to the Open Access movement, Open Educational resources are of high quality, available for free, online, with minimal or no licensing restrictions. They include, but are not limited to: syllabi and course modules, open textbooks, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Arizona State University (ASU) has many fully online degree programs from undergraduate to graduate level, as well as supplemental and continuing education certificates. ASU also has many hybrid programs and in-person courses that include online components. Instructors are often searching for online videos or other high quality, online educational materials that they can incorporate in their courses. OERs may provide some useful options. ASU Libraries became involved in Open Education Week in March 2013. To expand on our involvement and increase resource options at ASU, the presenters decided to begin identifying useful OERs for health sciences. To do so, the presenters searched for and evaluated 2-3 sources for OERs each and noted the advantages and/or disadvantages of each, as well as any highly useful specific OERs.

Results: The presenters will discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of evaluated sources for Open Educational Resources and any highly useful specific OERs identified. We will also provide a brief overview of open source tools related to citation management.

Conclusion: Come to this presentation to explore the Open Education movement: hear about one research university library system's start with Open Education Week, and get an overview of free, online options for high quality Open Educational Resources in the Health Sciences.

Scholarly writing is an essential skill for nurses to communicate new research and evidence. Written communication directly relates to patient safety and quality of care. However, few online RN-BSN programs integrate writing instruction into their curricula. Nurses traditionally learn how to write from instructor feedback and often not until midway into their baccalaureate education. Innovative strategies are needed to help nurses apply critical thinking skills to writing. The authors discuss a collaborative project between nursing faculty and technical communication faculty to develop and implement a writing course that is 1 of the 1st courses the students take in the online RN-BSN program.

As health information professionals we are familiar with specialized resources such as PubMed and CINAHL but less familiar with general freely available tools such as Google, Google Scholar, and other open Google tools. We wondered:

1. What Google tools are Health Sciences Researchers and Healthcare Professionals using, and how are they using them?
2. How effective are Google and/or Google Scholar for literature searching?
3. What other research is needed in this area?

Methods:
We searched for: ‘Google’ across five health sciences and health sciences related databases (CINAHL, Cochrane, PsycInfo, PubMed, Web of Science) and in Google Scholar (*For Google Scholar we searched: health AND google). We reviewed the first 100 citations from each database and selected results that: 1. Mentioned use of a Google tool, or 2. Discussed the effectiveness of Google or Google Scholar in scholarly literature searching. Out of the second group, we selected and read the 10 most relevant articles discussing the effectiveness of Google and/or Google Scholar for literature searching. We tried out recommended best practices to search for topics we had previously searched only in subject specific databases.

Results:
Health Sciences Researchers and Healthcare Professionals use many Google tools for a variety of purposes. Each tool was used in different ways by authors writing in the Health Sciences (see pie charts and examples in poster). Regarding literature searching the poster includes Google Scholar content sources, Top Search Strategies for Google Scholar, and Considerations for using Google Scholar for literature searching.

Conclusions:
Health Science researchers use a variety of Google tools to gather and manipulate data, and to visualize and disseminate results. Health care professionals use Google tools to facilitate interventions and for interactive educational materials. For Literature searching our results encourage using Google Scholar to complement subject specific databases. Its unique content makes it a valuable resource for finding additional documents.

This paper presents a Bayesian framework for evaluative classification. Current education policy debates center on arguments about whether and how to use student test score data in school and personnel evaluation. Proponents of such use argue that refusing to use data violates both the public’s need to hold schools accountable when they use taxpayer dollars and students’ right to educational opportunities. Opponents of formulaic use of test-score data argue that most standardized test data is susceptible to fatal technical flaws, is a partial picture of student achievement, and leads to behavior that corrupts the measures.

A Bayesian perspective on summative ordinal classification is a possible framework for combining quantitative outcome data for students with the qualitative types of evaluation that critics of high-stakes testing advocate. This paper describes the key characteristics of a Bayesian perspective on classification, describes a method to translate a naïve Bayesian classifier into a point-based system for evaluation, and draws conclusions from the comparison on the construction of algorithmic (including point-based) systems that could capture the political and practical benefits of a Bayesian approach. The most important practical conclusion is that point-based systems with fixed components and weights cannot capture the dynamic and political benefits of a reciprocal relationship between professional judgment and quantitative student outcome data.

The spread of academic testing for accountability purposes in multiple countries has obscured at least two historical purposes of academic testing: community ritual and management of the social structure. Testing for accountability is very different from the purpose of academic challenges one can identify in community “examinations” in 19th century North America, or exams’ controlling access to the civil service in Imperial China. Rather than testing for ritual or access to mobility, the modern uses of testing are much closer to the state-building project of a tax census, such as the Domesday Book of medieval Britain after the Norman Invasion, the social engineering projects described in James Scott's Seeing like a State (1998), or the “mapping the world” project that David Nye described in America as Second Creation (2004). This paper will explore both the instrumental and cultural differences among testing as ritual, testing as mobility control, and testing as state-building.