March 10, 2015 (Tuesday)

Time: 5pm-6:30pm (1.5)
Hours completed (IST): 78.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 93.5/150


Today was my first solo BI. Things went really well. I showed up early to get a little clarification from the faculty member as to what she was looking for her students to learn and the type of resources she would want them to use (books, SPRJs, etc.). She expressed a preference for journal articles and thought that having workshop time at the end was a great idea.


The class was very small, maybe twelve students, and they were not a talkative bunch. I stopped quite a few times to ask questions and, with some prodding, did get students to offer answers. I think they just realized that I was going to keep asking questions no matter what. For the most part, I asked most of the questions during the second sample search (the one with a more formed topic) as I did not have to discuss limiters so much and wanted them to think about searching more actively here. To begin, I told them my topic [Salaries of people who work in historically low-paying jobs.], then entered the first part of the search string: (wealth* OR pay* OR saving* OR salar*) and explained what I had done and why. "What do you think we should put in the next line," I asked. Silence.

I tried again for a response by asking, "So we need to think about low-paying jobs. What are some industries that don't pay much...other than academia?" I got a couple of chuckles, not much, but then a hand went up. "Janitors," the student answered quizzically.


It was a start. I explained that janitors usually don't make a lot of money and that is a good answer but maybe not the best for searching a database. "Think of it this way," I explained, "do you think that enough academics have written about the salaries of janitors to get enough hits, or should we try something broader?" I told them that I thought that retail work and fast food were both jobs with low pay and likely to get us a good amount of hits. We added (retail* OR fast food) to our search string.


I then asked them to tell me what else we needed for my search. I got silence again so, worrying about using up too much time, explained that we needed to add the workers themselves into the string with (employ* OR worker*). After that we again discussed setting the publication date range and I asked them what we should set it to. One student replied with 2010, which we had done previously. I explained how that would normally be a good time; however, because we were searching for a topic related to the economy I told them that 2007 was a better place to start. When I asked them why, one student correctly said it was because of the recession.


Despite worrying about time, I ended up finishing with too much time left. The professor asked if I would show them how to use KentLINK (the school catalog) because I had just briefly covered it since the professor was looking for them to use journal articles.


After that and getting silence in return to my plea for questions, I let the students workshop. I also asked the faculty member if she would be willing to fill out my assessment since I had nobody there to observe me. Luckily, she was happy to. While this was hardly a scientific exercise, it at least gave me something to talk about with Tammy.