High School to College Transition Interest Group

The meeting started with Jenna Pitera and Lindsay Bush describing their survey on students’ research skills at Union College.

In the autumn of 2022, the Union librarians started working intensely with first-year students. The librarians had a sense that students were arriving at college with fewer skills than before the pandemic, but they wanted more information to determine whether they were correct. They designed a survey for incoming students and sent it to students before the Fall 2024 Quarter began. They had a 50% response rate from incoming students! They also surveyed faculty about what skills they expected students to enter with and found a wide gap between incoming student experiences and faculty expectations. 

The group then discussed some of the faculty expectations that high school librarians do not cover. There was a lot of discussion of Google Scholar, which is heavily used in college. High school librarians were not aware of this. It is difficult for them to teach Google Scholar because they usually cannot access the articles that are the result of a Google Scholar search. Most high schools have extremely limited access to databases and scholarly articles. They rely on NovelNY, which contains very general databases - mostly those from Gale.

Union librarians begin their instruction with Google, then Google Scholar, then specific databases. They introduce federated searching later in instruction because it often does not work well or retrieve good results. The high school librarians tend to start with Brittanica, then Gale OneFile, then subject specific databases. Almost all of the subject specific databases are Gale. High school librarians tend to avoid teaching Google at all because students have trouble determining which results are reliable and which are not.

Both the college and high school librarians said that students have a difficult time identifying what they are looking at when they do searching, such as identifying journal articles.

High school librarians said that teachers are offering fewer opportunities for students to do research because classes are more mixed in ability now, and there are a lot of challenges with creating differentiated instruction when it comes to research. Students in classes that are cross-registered with local colleges have a greater chance of doing research. Perhaps school librarians should start with these classes when introducing concepts that will be needed in college.

The college faculty's expectations are wildly unrealistic. What can librarians do to close this gap? 

The college librarians asked what New York State information literacy standards require. That would be a good starting point for telling college faculty what the state expects students to know when they enter college. The school librarians noted that there are no formal literacy standards, just the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum that is endorsed by the state but not adopted. The national School Library Standards are being revised. 

High schools are being evaluated on things like passing rates and graduation rates, which means there is very little focus on research. The new science standards will require research, but there is a concern about how students will be assessed in this research. A big focus of high school is getting students over the finish line, which means there is little emphasis on making them independent learners, and there is lots of hand-holding. This is the opposite of college, where students are expected to be proactive.

The Union College survey shows that students are afraid to ask for help. They don’t want to admit to the faculty that they don’t know how to do something. Students tend to come to the library to ask for guidance rather than tell faculty that they don’t have experience or understand what the professor is talking about.

The meeting ended with school librarians expressing a desire to learn more about Google Scholar and how academic librarians teach it to their students. Jenna and Lindsay will explore hosting an event at Union to demonstrate how they work with students and what is available at a college library. They hope to host an in-person event between Thanksgiving and New Year’s when Union students are on break. The high school librarians indicated that they should be able to get permission to attend an event like this during the school day.