Denise Dimsdale (Education Librarian) and Dr. Sarah Carlson (Learning Services, College of Education and Human Development) discuss how they developed two classroom activities to help students with choosing a topic for working on annotated bibliography and literature review assignments.

The first activity involves a unique approach to using the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms within the APA PsycINFO database to identify available topics, ​and how to narrow down topic searches to obtain a more doable list of results (e.g., using filters). The second classroom activity involves using a modified version of the PICO (Population, Intervention/ Investigation, Comparison, Outcome) framework ​to guide students for narrowing down their topics of interest even further, thinking of how to group their topics of interest into subtopics. Each will be presented with an example and student feedback.

The session concludes with discussion of how Dimsdale and Carlson plan to teach these sessions in an online format. 

"Teaching with Librarians" is a series of conversations highlighting creative faculty/librarian teaching collaborations. Faculty, graduate student instructors, and library colleagues are invited to attend to learn more about the planning, processes, obstacles, and successes each team has experienced, and to participate in a discussion of lessons learned, techniques developed, and ideas spurred by these presentations.

This session was recorded on March 13, 2020 by CETL staff member Cortney Pizzarelli.