Home - Guide for FRINQ Instructors and Mentors - LibGuides at Portland State University

What is this guide?

This guide is designed to support faculty and mentors involved in FRINQ. We want to help you to prepare students for college-level research! This guide is not meant to be used with students, but to give you a sense of what we can put into a custom guide for your course. We encourage you to work with the librarian assigned to your FRINQ theme to develop a plan for research instruction and a custom course guide that will provide tailored classroom support.

In This Guide

On this page, we describe some of the services we can offer to faculty and mentors to support student learning about research. The subsequent pages contain tutorials and suggested activities and assessments that you can use with your students. Many of them can either be offered during class or can be assigned, making them flexible solutions for teaching these important skills.

The librarian assigned to your class can create a custom course guide with just the content you need; this guide is designed to give you ideas about what is possible.

The instructional content is separated into five categories:

Learn About the Library - Learn what the library has to offer to help you be successful in your research.

Developing Your Topic - Decipering your assignment, choosing a workable topic that you're interested in, and brainstorming keywords

Searching - Best practices for searching library resources, determining where to search, and what to do when you have too few or too many results.

Evaluating Sources - Now that you have search results, how do you determine which will meet your needs and your professor's requirements?

Citing Sources - Using sources in your paper while avoiding plagiarism.

How the Library Can Support You

The librarians look forward to partnering with you to ensure your students develop the research skills they need to be successful in college and in life!

For each FRINQ, there is a librarian assigned to the class who wants to work with you to support you in helping students' research skill development. Here are just a few things we can do to help:

1. We can develop an online course guide for your class tailored to your students' assignment. The guide will contain recommended resources for your students as well as instructional content that you see on the other pages of this gude. In consultation with you, we'll learn what you plan to teach and can make the guide fit your specific needs. Click here to see an example of the sort of guide we can create for individual classes.

2. We can visit your class for a quick intro to what the library has to offer. We would like to come in for 10-15 minutes to introduce ourselves and give a brief overview of how the library can support students with their research. A perfect time for us to visit is right around the time that the students have been given a research assignment. We want students to know that the librarians are here to help them if they need it.

3. Your students can take a tour of the physical library. The library offers tours regularly twice per week that anyone can join and individual classes can also schedule tours.

4. We can help create lesson plans on specific research skills that you can use in the full class or mentor sessions. We can give you online tutorials and suggested activities or assignments that will help you determine whether students need additional support in areas like evaluating sources and searching library databases.

5. We can help your students! In the Fall, Winter and Spring, we plan to offer drop-in workshops around weeks 6, 7, and 8 for FRINQ students to come in and get help with their specific research assignments. Also, just like any student, they can get help from the reference desk, which is available 24/7 (via instant messaging).

If there are other ways you need help that aren't on this list, don't hesitate to contact us. You can contact the librarian assigned to your class or, if you don't know who your librarian is, you can contact Meredith Farkas (whose contact info is to your right).