Article Note: On libraries serving transfer students

Citation for the article: Vinyard, Marc, "The Kids Are All Right: How Libraries Can Best Serve Transfer Students." portal: Libraries and the Academy, 20.2 (April 2020): 339-360.

 

As the article states in the title, "the kids are all right." While there is room for improvement for academic libraries to serve transfer students, the situation for these students is not as bad as previous library literature suggests. This quote from a student sums up the situation well: 

 

"There's not so much where you have to explain everything to transfer students. Because, like I said, we've had most of the information before, it's just figuring out how it's done here, and just getting a new mind-set essentially" (339). 

More often than not the idea is that libraries need to teach students how to do things locally rather than give full on information literacy instruction. The transfer students likely did get that instruction previously. Having said that, that experience at times can also make those students a bit more confident than they probably should be when it comes to their skills; in other words, they can get a little cocky. The author concluded that these students usually have a good understanding of how to do research and are confident in their research skills. They just need to learn institution-specific skills when they arrive in a new campus. I will say this does match with my experience over time when working with transfer students. They know more than librarians may give them credit for. 

The study took place at Pepperdine University, which is a Christian liberal arts university with 3,400 enrolled students at the time of the article. It almost twice the size of the college where I work, but it would still be comparable to us. Their First-Year Seminar and English 101 classes would be somewhat comparable to our General Studies GSTR 110 and 210 which serve an FYE seminar-type function here. 

The article states that two researchers conducted "in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 transfer students at Pepperdine during Spring 2018" (343). These students had to be undergraduates "who had completed at least one research assignment at Pepperdine that required resources outside their course readings" (343). That sample size seems a bit small to me but the author claims that the applied thematic analysis technique used means they could have gone as low as six students and gotten meaningful information. I leave it up to readers to judge. By the way, the interview participants did receive incentives to participate. "Participants in the study received $20 Amazon gift cards and $5 Starbucks vouchers as incentives" (344). Must be nice since here it is next to impossible to provide any incentive when we want to survey students on anything. I know; I've asked.The usual answer is either lack of funds (i.e. the administrators do not want to give us funds for the incentives even as other campus units give out all sorts of incentives) or some other excuse about "if we give them some kind of monetary incentive it can interfere with their aid or other" (which see previous statement), but I digress. The participants were nine females and three males. 

The article includes an appendix that features the interview instrument. I am thinking we could adapt some of the questions for our use here down the road.

Some takeaways for me from the article: 

• I like the idea of setting up a personal librarian program for transfer students, and students in general, but this may not always be successful. For example, the author mentions a program at University of Carolina at Chapel Hill where such effort was made to assign 40 librarians to 800 students. "Despite e-mail communication and welcome letters to incoming students, only 3.9 percent of transfer students utilized the program, falling short of its initial goal of 5 percent participation" (341). As we can see some things never change, in this case the known fact that students often neglect to even read their campus e-mail. By the way, 40 librarians seems to me a lot, but we need to realize UNC-Chapel Hill is a big campus. 
• The study aimed to answer the following two questions: 
• "How do transfer students look for information?"
• "From the transfer students' perspectives, how can the library best assist them?" (343).
•  On how the students approach research: 
• "While discussing the sources used for assignments, student preferences were evenly split between starting with open Web searches and with library databases" (346). 
• "One student warned, however, that peer-reviewed sources might not cover recent topics. . . " (346). This caught my eye because this is a reality I often need to convey to regular undergraduates when they pick the latest fad topic or straight out of the news event and they come asking for "peer reviewed sources" because their teacher said they need such sources. This can lead me to some interesting conversations with a student. A transfer student may be more likely to have learned this lesson. 
• "Additional methods [of finding sources] included approaches to organizing sources, determining if multiple sources had recurring themes, brainstorming effective keywords, and writing the conclusion of a paper before searching for sources" (347). I was doing OK with these until that last one, which can be problematic. At times, students who write out the conclusion before doing research are the ones we get in a panic a day or two before the paper is due because they need "just one more source, two tops" that fits whatever conclusion they fixated on when they started rather than doing actual research and taking the question where the research went. 
• On the role of librarians: 
• Sadly, "transfer students would much more likely ask professors rather than librarians for assistance" (349). We need to work on that. Sure, ask your professors for help related to the class, but ask your librarian for research assistance. The author also found that out of the twelve students interviewed, only one "favored librarians" (350). That is not exactly encouraging. In my college, we are lucky that we tend to get good feedback from students for our research consultations. Librarians do need to put in the work and effort.
  
• "Prior interactions with librarians can potentially influence the help-seeking behavior of transfer students at their new institutions" (349). This is where making a good impression as a librarian and professional will encourage students to seek us for assistance. I have heard enough stories of how librarians in prior institutions were not helpful to students. Honestly makes me wonder why some people become librarians if they are not helping their patrons or consider them a bother.  
• However, the author cites research that found "that transfer students who received library instruction would be more likely to ask subject librarians for research assistance" (353). I will add that here we have found that marketing librarian research consults during library instruction has helped to get students to seek library help later. Yet during COVID, without formal library instruction, this marketing has been more limited. 
• "Because institution-specific information is so important to helping transfer students succeed, libraries need to make them aware of library services. Nearly all the students interviewed thought the library should participate in the transfer student orientation sessions" (353). 
• To sum up: "Specifically, we need to implement outreach efforts that help students gain the following competencies: (1) familiarity with their subject liaison librarians, (2) knowledge of the subject-specific databases, and (3) ability to navigate the library's physical layout and services with emphasis on the library's print collections" (354). The knowledge of subject-specific databases is important, and it is something we do try to emphasize here as much as we can. The common "just use a discovery engine" or similar just does not really cut it to do focused research on a specific topic, but that is another topic for another day. 

Some items from the article's bibliography I may want to read later: 

•  John C. Phillips and Thomas A. Atwood, “Transferring Skills, Transferring Students: A Call
  to Academic Libraries,” College & Undergraduate Libraries 17, 4 (2010): 331–48.
• Lindsay M. Roberts, Megan E. Welsh, and Brittany Dudek, “Instruction and Outreach for
  Transfer Students: A Colorado Case Study,” College & Research Libraries 80, 1 (2019): 94–122.
• Helene Lafrance and Shannon B. Kealey, “A Boutique Personal Librarian Program for
  Transfer Students,” Reference Services Review 45, 2 (2017): 337.
• Sylvia G. Tag, “A Library Instruction Survey for Transfer Students: Implications for Library
  Services,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 30, 2 (2004): 102–8. 
• Chelsea Heinbach, Brittany Paloma Fiedler, Rosan Mitola, and Emily Pattni, “Dismantling
  Deficit Thinking: A Strengths-Based Inquiry into the Experiences of Transfer Students in
  and out of Academic Libraries,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, February 6, 2019, http://
  www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/dismantling-deficit-thinking/.