The UC campuses have adopted many different approaches to help students acquire the skills necessary to perform scholarly research in today's information-rich environment. Several campuses offer for-credit courses that teach students about conducting research, and librarians often visit classrooms to provide instruction on how to use library resources for a particular subject area.

UC Berkeley has taken an innovative approach by creating a fellowship program in which librarians work with faculty to integrate research assignments into undergraduate courses. Known as the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship for Undergraduate Research, the program's goals include building "undergraduate knowledge of information resources" and enhancing "student research and information competencies." Funded for four years by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program has an emphasis on lower division courses with the goal of introducing research skills early on so that students can develop and apply them throughout their academic careers.

"A lot of Berkeley's undergraduates go on to graduate school so we want to prepare them to be good scholars," says Elizabeth Dupuis, project director of the Mellon program. "We want the fellows to walk away feeling confident that they redesigned a course introducing some kind of research for their students beyond a traditional research paper."

Fifteen faculty fellows attend a two-week summer institute and are teamed with "implementation teams" assigned to work with them throughout the semester in redesigning their courses and research assignments. The implementation teams are made up of representatives from various academic service units including the Library, GSI Teaching and Resource Center, Student Learning Center, and Educational Technology Services.
The Mellon program targets high impact courses, such as introductory or "gateway" courses to "ensure that all students have this introduction to conducting research at logical times in their academic career," says Dupuis.

Michelle Douskey, who teaches Chemistry 1A, had already tried integrating a research project into her course before she became a Mellon fellow in 2004. Although experimental projects are common in introductory chemistry courses, library-based research projects are not.

Douskey says that integrating such a project into the huge course -- 1300 students in 43 sections -- was daunting, and that several colleagues told her it could not be done. She says she was only able to pull it off because of the help she received from her Mellon implementation team.

"I was trying to figure out a way to engage the students in discovering knowledge for themselves rather than me being a purveyor of knowledge that they would somehow absorb," says Douskey. "I wanted to create an experience in which the students had to pull concepts together at the end of the semester and not just study for the final. I wanted a deep understanding of the relevant chemistry of the chosen topic."

She used student peer review to minimize the labor required of herself and the graduate student instructors, as well as to help students learn by teaching. The students prepared posters about their research and presented them during their discussion sections. In addition, every student was required to critique two other posters.

Overall, the project was a success, says Douskey.

"I'm seeing a big impact in my course and with myself," says Douskey. "Because of the nature of these large enrollment courses, we have a chance to make a real impact on the university, which is exciting."

Charis Thompson, a professor in Rhetoric and Gender & Women's Studies, and Greg Niemeyer, a professor in Art Practice, became Mellon fellows to help them develop a new interdisciplinary course called the "Foundations of American Cyber-Cultures." Not only was the content of the course about technology, but the instructors also used digital tools in almost every aspect, such as to "hand out" assignments, provide feedback, and do grading. Students were required to present their research in the format of web pages and submit all of their work electronically.

But the instructors were not interested in only technological ways of accessing and presenting information. They devoted one class period to a walking tour of all the campus's "sites of knowledge production," such as the library and media commons, and a librarian provided in-class instruction on research methodologies and contributed content to the course, says Thompson.

"It was great fun to do something that was not just content interdisciplinary but also technically interdisciplinary," says Thompson. "We emphasized that every form of knowledge has a medium and every time has a technology and the web is ours today."