Undergraduate research and academic archives: Instruction, learning and assessment

Colleges and universities are increasingly investing resources to promote undergraduate research. Undergraduate research can be broadly defined to incorporate scientific inquiry, creative expression, and scholarship with the result of producing original work. Academic archives and special collections can play a vital role in the undergraduate research process, particularly for students in the humanities and social sciences. The original primary source materials housed in on-campus repositories coupled with the experience and guidance of archivists can assist students in learning to analyze documents and create innovative research projects. The educational role of archivists has long been espoused in the literature, but has not been analyzed to examine the content, quality, and impact of the instruction archivists provide to students. The research studies reported in this dissertation investigate the instructional role that archivists play in the emerging undergraduate research movement by surveying instructional practices, interviewing teaching archivists, and developing a rubric for assessing archival instruction.;The first study, based on a survey of over 200 practicing archivists, is a broad exploration of the kinds of instructional activities and resources archivists provide to various users. Findings about the logistics, methods, and delivery of instruction are presented, as well as barriers archivists face and their approaches to assessment. The second study goes beyond describing the instructional practices of archivists to isolate their pedagogical role in undergraduate education. The participants reflect on their own extensive instructional experience to discuss what undergraduates need to learn about primary sources, which teaching strategies work best with this user group, and what types of assessment have been employed in improving instruction. The third study introduces an assessment tool, in the form of a rubric, to measure student learning from archival instruction. The study examines what students in an undergraduate history course at a large state university learn from archival instruction through a quasi-experimental field study. The results of this research indicate that archivists are just beginning to distill their instructional efforts and have much further to go in identifying the necessary components of instruction, implementing pedagogical strategies, and evaluating their teaching.