Universal Design for Learning, the Library, and STEM: Common Cause, Uncommon Ground

Abstract

In summer 2012, the Science Librarian and Instructional Design Librarian at Joyner Library, East Carolina University, came together to design a series of interactive tutorials to assist with questions related to an assignment for entry-level, first year biology course. The students are required to find primary and secondary sources in scholarly Biology literature. The librarians applied Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to create a tutorial hosted in LibGuides that engages students who learn visually and kinetically. The tutorial also assists reference staff who may be unfamiliar with research in the sciences and reduces the number of questions about the assignment at the reference desk. The poster will highlight the methods used in creating the tutorial, as well as best practices for information literacy tutorials in the STEM fields.

The librarians are in the process of completing a usability test with students with learning disabilities to investigate the UDL principles and are gathering additional qualitative and quantitative data to investigate overall efficacy of the tutorial. The initial findings of this study, which is ongoing, will be shared at the poster session. The research conducted in this project contributes to the field of Librarianship by further investigating the use of UDL principles in online tutorials, of which there is little in the literature. The tutorial is freely available through LibGuides community site or via ECU directly, and the researchers will be on hand to provide hands-on demos, pass out links to the tutorial, as well as answer questions about the study.