#lilac16: Teaching electronic resources to students with computer anxiety

Lilac went by so fast... and it's already over!

On Monday, I presented a short paper to an impressively packed classroom...

Picture by Heather Dalal.

As promised, here is my presentation, with added notes so that you get what I was talking about...

Teaching electronic resources to students with computer anxiety from Aurélie Gandour

Note that lots of the active learning activities I mention come directly (or after modification) from this book (aka: the Bible).

I will try and post "how-tos" for some of the activities I adapted on this blog later on.

In the next few days, I will also post my notes from talks I attended... Stay tuned!

Library anxiety

This post is a translation from Thomas Chaimbault's post in French, "L'angoisse de la bibliothèque". His blog, Vagabondages, is an essential one in the French libraries' blogosphere. He writes about libraries and information sciences, mostly from an Higher Education point of view (he is in charge for information skills training in an Higher Education setting, in Lyon). If you can read enough French, I definitely recommend to add his blog to your reader and to follow him on Twitter!


In 1986, Constance A. Mellon formalized the concept of library anxiety.

This anxiety is supposed to be concerning quite an important number of readers, to various degrees, and would refer to both an anxiety of the library as a place (in its size, its fitting, its organisation and the classification of its documents) often considered as unclear, and of the library as a mean to find resources (services, resources, training...). It's a strong psychological barrier keeping students from using the library in an efficient manner, on site and online.

The Anxiety of Searching for a Book, UCLA

1. Theorizing Library Anxiety

In her grounding article (which at least, formalized the concept, since other studies had already showed some apprehension of the public), "Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development", published in College and Research Libraries in March 1986, Constance A. Mellon describes a study carried out over two years about the students' feelings when beginning a library search. The results are clear: 75% to 85% of students mention a feeling of fear when using the library for the first time and this feeling is even more present when the time comes to do a search. An analysis of personal writings of students allows her to also identify recurring themes of fear, confusion, of being of out of their depth, lost, without resource, still at that fateful moment of the information search. It's by connecting those anxiety feelings linked to maths or tests that she coins this notion of "library anxiety".

This anxiety can be translated in several ways:

• Fear of the library as a place, often described by its impressive size;
• Not knowing where to find information, nor how it's organised;
• Lack of self-confidence concerning how to conduct a search;
• Fear of the librarian him/herself with a refusal of asking for help;
• Feeling like they're the only one not to understand how the library works;
• Feeling of paralysis when starting an information search.

From there, students seem less focused on their work and can't do their searches correctly. Mellon specifies: "Students become so anxious about having to gather information in a library for their research papers that they are unable to approach the problem logically or effectively". It can even result, according to the research of our American colleagues on this topic, in the failure of obtaining a diploma (Onwuegbuzie and Jiao, 1998).

Without going that far, other researchers have shown since then the permanence of this negative feeling towards libraries (Bostick, 1993), while Jiao, Onwuegbuzie and Lichtenstein fleshed out the concept, explaining that those feelings could have cognitive, affective, physiological and behavioural consequences directly interfering with the carrying out of informational tasks (Jiao, Onwuegbuzie and Lichtenstein, 1996).
This anxiety is considered as a unique phenomenon, specific to the library environment and not in connection with the general anxiety linked to the first years of higher education. Even though it has been suggested that some of its dimensions, like asking for help, can be linked to character traits independent from libraries, no empirical proof has been provided to support this proposition.

2. A measurement scale

In 1992, Sharon Bostick proposes a measurement scale to detect and evaluate the potential anxiety caused by the library on students. This scale identifies several areas carrying anxiety:

• Barriers with staff: staff members are perceived as intimidating, inaccessible and anyway too busy or having other more important tasks to do rather than helping readers;
• Affective barriers (perceived informational skills): the student feels incapable of doing searches and of using the library as a place for resources, this feeling being reinforced by the idea of being the only one to be lost and confused;
• Being comfortable within the library (as a physical space): a feeling of comfort, security, of being welcome in the library, also linked to the layout and furnitures favouring or not how students are welcomed in the library;
• Knowledge of the library (internal organisation): the student doesn't understand how the library is organised, doesn't feel familiar with it, feels frustrated;
• Mechanical barriers: feeling linked to the machines, equipments, computers... A student having a hard time using machines is susceptible of developing a deeper anxiety.

[download the Bostick scale]

In 1997, Owuegbuzie adds:

• Resources anxiety: frustration related to the resources availability, especially linked to not finding full-text during an online search.

Several research studies have then focused on this anxiety's origin, trying to detect direct or indirect antecedents. If no direct antecedent was revealed, several indirect antecedents were then proposed, with situational, contextual or dispositional (that the student brings herself) origins.

Source: Library Anxiety: Theory, Research, and Application by Anthony J: Onzuegubzie, Qun G. Jiao, Sharon L. Bostick

Among those variables, Jiao and Onwuegbuzie mainly identified:

• Low level of perceived social acceptance;
• Social injonction for perfection;
• Academic procrastination;
• Bad study habits;
• Low reading skills;
• Learning style;
• Low computer literacy;
• Low hopes to overcome hurdles linked to goals' pursuit;
• Social interdependence.

Some of those research studies identify a complex link between this library anxiety and other anxieties linked to higher education, research, public communication; a whole set affecting the student more or less directly.

Source : Library Anxiety: Theory, Research, and Applications by Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, Qun G. Jiao, Sharon L. Bostick

3. Fighting against library anxiety

Studies trying to reduce library anxiety focus on how to make the library more acceptable, comfortable for students by giving them either the skills to develop their knowledge of the space and self-confidence, or to reassure them concerning the normalcy of the phenomenon and explaining strategies to use so as to overcome its negative effects.

The idea is to work on the training provided, regarding its content as well as the librarian's attitude. Indeed, better trained students will feel more familiar with the space and will see their anxiety limited. More broadly, it means making it easier to meet professionals, getting students to understand and know that there will always be someone to welcome them, answer their questions without judging them and supporting them in their searches.

Simply recognizing such an anxiety helps reducing it. Thus, several proposals have been drawn up:

• Recounting this feeling or similar experiences with more or less humour through videos or discussion sessions between students;
• Telling students that bad experiences at various levels of information search are normal;
• Talking about this kind of anxiety during training sessions.

But generally, the idea will be to get the library to become a friendly space, turned towards its users, to work on librarians behaviours, to provide a positive experience of the library as a space and to reinforce training sessions. So nothing extraordinary.

Several libraries actively work on the topic and don't hesitate to follow up on students who could be victims of this anxiety. For example, the Washington State University's library proposes a specific libguide giving leads on how to apprehend the library better or playing on the librarian's stereotypes.

Actually, we're doing the same and are also working through digital mediation to improve the user's experience, and thus to reduce this anxiety linked to the library. It goes without saying. But it's better to say it anyway.


To go further:

• Try this short test to know if you have library anxiety
• Atlas, Michel C. "Library Anxiety in the Electronic Era,or Why Won’t anybody Talk to Me Anymore?" Reference & User Services Quarterly, 44. 4 (2005): 314-19. 
• Bostick, Sharon L. "The Development and Validation of the Library Anxiety Scale," Research in Reference Effectiveness, vol. 16, 1993. 
• Mellon, Constance A. "Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and its development," College &Research Libraries, vol. 47, March 1986 : 160-65. 
• Carlil, Heather. "The Implication of library anxiety for academic refernce services : a review of the litterature". AARL, June 2007 vol 38 no 2 
• Hartman, Shawn “Library fear deconstructed : overcoming Library Anxiety”, 28th Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience, February 6-10, 2009, Orlando, Florida.

Low-Tech Information Literacy Training Sessions

I'm lucky to work in an institution that receive quite a diverse public. Actually, a lot of my students follow their courses part-time and have been working for several years.
With them, a problem I encounter quite often, is a weak computer literacy, which keeps them from using many of our resources. And since I don't have the possibility to up their level directly, I have to get creative...
Here are the methods and the tricks I use to take their needs into account during my training sessions, in seven points.

- Know who you're talking to. I systematically send a questionnaire the week before the training session, so as to ascertain the level of the students. I don't ask them what they know how to do (do you know ho to...? > yes / no / I'm not sure) but how confident they are regarding different tools (how do you feel about...? > very confident / confident / not really confident / what is that?).

- Create level groups. If possible, dividing the students in level groups is so much better!
I either ask them to sort themselves in different groups on their own (it does work quite well) or I divide them myself, based on their answers to my questionnaire.
Hence, I get to isolate the weakest students and I can spend some time, at the beginning of the session, to check that they do know how to use Firefox (yes, indeed...) and how to find the library's website before doing anything else.
With the other groups, I'm going to be able to go faster and see more things.

- Learning without the stress of the tool. The important bit that I'm trying to pass onto my students, is not how to use a particular tool (it's part of it, but it's definitely not the first point on my list), but the method behind it. This is where the transferable skills lay, that will enable them to use, not only this particular database, but all similar databases (for example).

So, if we're getting away from a particular tool to go towards the abstract concepts behind it, we can get away from the computers to play with more physical materials, like graphics, "hands on" activities or other pedagogical tools.
And that's really good when you're talking to people who get extremely stressed out when using computers. It enables us to talk calmly of a particular concept, to make sure that they understand the basics before going back to the computer to apply it.
Other use: to give a class in a room with no computer, where the students won't get a chance to try out the tool immediately. It allows us to make sure that they, at least, got the concepts.
And it works even with the most computer literates, who shouldn't need this crutch to understand how to write a search equation, for example. In my feedback survey, the hands-on activities I propose always are what the students liked best in the session.

So what does it look like? It can be worksheets such as the "Good Search / Bad Search" which I talked about in my post on active pedagogies.
It can also be real little board games created to illustrate a particular concept, group games, puzzles, do-it-yourself activities... I'm working on a number of them and I will present them here once they've been tested on my students.

- Take your time. According to my feedback surveys, even when I put a lot of simple activities in a session, the students tend to think that the lesson was at the right pace. So it's best to go as slowly as possible and let them play with the concepts during pedagogical activities rather than going as fast as possible to try and see as many things as possible in a record time: taking your time is never a bad thing.

- Finally going back to the computer. At one moment or another, you do need to let go of your little papers and go back to the computer screen.

If the group has a weak level and is fairly homogeneous, I'm going to go as slowly as possible and see very little things. The idea is not to overwhelm them, but to make sure that they get confident enough to be able to reproduce the simple steps that I'm going to show them.
I show each step one by one on the main screen and wait until everyone has been able to do the same on their computer before going to the next step, even for the most elementary things such as clicking a button...

If I wasn't able to divide the class in level groups, I ask a colleague to come and help me. She's going to check on the weakest ones and help them while I present more advanced functions to the others.

- Photocopies, photocopies everywhere. What's the use of having course materials online if the students have a hard time accessing them? For the computer literate students, the question is moot. But for the others I'm now systematically going for printed copies.
I always have better feedback when I give out old-fashioned paper handouts. Of course, I put everything online as well and send them an email with the links just after the session.

Other example: when my feedback survey was online, only 25% of the students answered it. Now that I give out printed copies for them to fill in before leaving the class, I have 100% responses!
Okay, it's bad for the trees... But I have yet to find a better alternative.

A last point:
- Training the teachers. I systematically ask the teachers to come to the training session with their students: more often than not, they need it more than them! It's particularly true of those who don't want to give me too much time with their classes: they often don't even know of all the knowledge and tools we can give them. And sometimes, their computer literacy is not very good either...
For those who can't come, I propose to go directly to their office to train them. I will get them all!

The above picture is of Phil Gyford. 

It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

Active Learning in Libraries

Just as most librarians, I haven't received any initial training on teaching techniques. Nonetheless, particularly in Higher Education, many of us have to regularly give training sessions to students of various levels. In my case, this is my principal mission within my institution.
I see post-graduate students and people doing CPD, most of them for a one-shot session (though, I'm working to make that change...) during which I have to make sure that, from now on, they will be perfectly autonomous for their literature searches. It's ambitious. And there is really a lot to teach them in a few hours gleaned from the course of a kind tutor.

Self-train thyself on training others

So I'm trying to train myself as much as possible, through "train the trainer" courses or well-chosen readings. In particular, I went to an exciting workshop by Andrew Walsh on creating games to use in libraries. On this occasion, I discovered his book, Active Learning Techniques for Librarians (1), an incredible resource full of activities ideas to use when giving training sessions to students.

Active learning means involving the learner in her learning, giving her a more active role than the one she's usually given in conference-type courses. Now, that active dimension should allow the learner to retain information and skills better.
Since librarians usually give one-shot sessions and that we probably won't see those students ever again in training, it's all the more crucial to make sure that they actually remember what we're trying to teach them!

Moreover, active training allows us to assess the students' understanding during class, giving us the possibility to give them live feedback on their performance. For example, it's going to be much easier to identify people who haven't really understood a point, and to explain it again, differently, so that they can correct their mistakes.
Finally, a normal person being only able to really focus for a very short periods (usually, a few minutes), scattering a session with active learning activities allows for a change of rhythm, a sort of  break, to get back afterwards with more focus.

But what does it look like?

Andrew Walsh and Padma Inala recommend to use their activities all along a session. For example, we'll begin by breaking the ice with something a bit funny, allowing us in a same shot to send a message about what we expect from the group: don't get asleep, don't get scared, you're going to have to talk and draw and other stuff, but it all should be okay... During the session, we carry on with a few activities going over each point of the program. And we finish with a last activity allowing us to check on the knowledge of the students or to make them reflect about their new skills.

So, all of this is all very nice, but in reality, are we just reinventing the wheel, trying to give exercises and assessing learning? For sure, a little. But that can't be too bad, can it?
Above all, aren't we going to play the role of the annoying teacher wanting students to participate at all costs when they'd just like to sleep quietly? Danger is real. Personally, I was mainly scared of looking ridiculous with my kindergarten games.

But.

But I tested for you active learning techniques on a class of eight PhD students last month. And they loved it. I made them laugh with my spoof activity and the feedback forms they filled in were full with positive comments. So, there is hope.

I'm going to keep testing those techniques with other classes and I'll keep you posted.

A few examples

Meanwhile, here are a few examples of activities I liked, from Walsh and Inala's book. I tested some of them and I will try out the others very soon.

"What's your favourite?"
Choose a question (for example, "what's your favourite database?") and put it up on a wall. Beneath, put up several papers corresponding to the different possible answers (one for each database your students can access for example). When the students enter the classroom, before they sit down, ask them to cast their vote by putting a sticky note beneath their answer. It's very visual and it's a good conversation starter.

"Make a Spoof"
Ask students to work on a spoof subject in groups. For example, I asked my PhD students to write down five things that would allow them to do the worst literature search ever...
Quite good as an introduction, so as to get them to start thinking about the topic of the course.

"Good Search, Bad Search"
After having shown students how to do a perfect literature search, give them an example of a "bad search" and have them discuss in pairs:
- How come this is a "bad search"?
- How could they make it better?

"I will do it"
At the end of the session, ask the students to write down what they're going to do in the coming weeks to put into practice what they learned. Have them write down their names and email addresses. Send them a scan of their form the next month, asking them if they actually did what they said they would and if you can help them achieving their goals.



(1) Walsh, Andrew and Inala, Padma (2010) Active Learning Techniques for Librarians: Practical Examples. Chandos, Cambridge. ISBN 9781843345923 

Photo : Brook Ward
This picture is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

I translated this article from my French blog: Pédagogie active en bibliothèque.