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The purpose of this article is to share with leadership educators a writing exercise designed to provide doctoral students enrolled in an Administrative and Policy Leadership course an opportunity to gain experience with building collective will for policy advocacy on a social justice issue. This article describes the use of a letter writing assignment including the background and justification for using letter writing rather than other forms of writing across the curriculum, instructions for students to complete the assignment, and examples and ideas for grading and providing constructive and instructive feedback to leadership students. The article concludes with recommendations and potential assignment modifications for leadership educators that choose to adopt this type of writing assignment within their leadership training curriculum.

The purpose of the study is to produce design guidelines based on insights from both practice and theory that will enable teachers and educational developers to execute the design, implementation and evaluation of their work‐related learning arrangements with stakeholders involved.

The first study reported in this paper can be characterised as an exploratory design study. The second and third study can be described as design‐oriented research.

The case studies showed that to realize work related learning arrangements mutual understanding between stakeholders is needed to decide what has to be learned by the students and to create learning situations that have a high similarity with real working situations.

The ultimate evaluation question whether students indeed show high levels of learning outcomes on the levels of the framework when they followed work‐related learning arrangements that are arranged according to the design guidelines, fall out of the scope of this paper.

Factors that influence the intended and implemented design of work related arrangements are derived from practical and theoretical insights. Design guidelines to influence these factors in a positive direction are formulated, based on these insights. For the expected learning outcomes a dynamic framework is developed.

Work related learning arrangements are still rare in higher education and practical experience is generally only gained during short periods of internships. So the finding that learning by experience and social interaction and learning by theory and reflection should be combined in joint work related learning arrangements to obtain the most impact on the ability to transfer, will not immediately become custom.

Teachers, educational developers and stakeholders who are involved in developing the design, implementation and evaluation of their joint work‐related learning arrangements will find evidence based design guidelines and a framework to assess learning outcomes. The theoretical insights are based on a multidisciplinary combination of workplace learning theories, educational science and innovation management theory.

Writing as a hot topic in literacy has recently gained a foothold in terms of importance to academic and career success, finally receiving the attention it warrants and thus, this chapter provides timely information about how to teach writing products and processes in the 21st century.

Through a historical examination of writing instruction, this chapter provides a contextual lens for how writing has not always been a priority in the field of literacy; how writing and reading are interconnected; and how differing theories aim to explain writing development.

Writing has taken on a balanced approach between writing for product and writing as a practice. Teacher pedagogy has been heavily influenced by the advent of high-stakes assessments. Other factors such as maintaining motivation and engagement for writing affect student performance. Writing and reading benefit from an integrated instructional approach.

Elements of writing instruction are deconstructed to provide information for teachers to support students’ confidence in their writing abilities, build their identity as writers, and promote individualization and creativity to flourish through independence.

This chapter proposes authentic leadership as a generic competence and an integral part of doctoral education regardless of field of study. The authors explore its potential to enhance the development of doctoral candidates and academics and search for answers to the questions: Can and should authentic leadership be developed as a generic competence in doctoral education? How can it be designed and implemented in a doctoral training module? What would its learning outcomes be? The authors address these questions in the context of doctoral education. They assert that authentic leadership training should be mandatory for all doctoral candidates, and that supervisors should be actively engaged in the development of this underappreciated transferrable skill.

This paper aims to argue that the process of making an original game develops digital literacy skills and provides an authentic learning experience as students create, publish and deploy interactive games. Teaching students to create computer games has become common in both K-12 and tertiary education to introducing programming concepts, increase student engagement and recruit majors and minors in technology fields. This study describes a project where first-year college students in an introductory technology concepts course use a visual game creation tool to develop original games to play on their computers and mobile devices.

The author created a game development exercise which was implemented in three different sections of an introductory technology course. Students who participated were surveyed about their experiences. In addition, the author considers information technology (IT) skills and aspects of authentic learning which are achieved through this assignment.

Initial findings suggest that students found the gaming assignment offers an opportunity for students with no prior programming skills to create software within a controlled and supportive environment. It allows them to demonstrate their understanding of coding principles, including identifying objects and interactions, and that creating software requires a developer to specify exact instructions for the computer to follow.

This study is limited to results from one semester and a small number of students participating. In addition, student frustration with the complicated process of publishing games online may have influenced student attitudes toward the assignment.

Challenges of implementing this study on a larger scale are discussed.

Creating games encourages collaborative learning through trial and error, and students who share their games with friends to play on their devices achieve a sense of pride.

While most studies of game development emphasize the programming skills that are developed through creating computer games, this paper looks at a larger scope of digital literacy and IT skills achieved, as well as opportunities to perform tasks often completed by IT professionals.

The purpose of this case study is to measure the impact of authenticity – the operation of one’s true self in one’s daily activities – on student engagement and learning in the context of information literacy instruction.

The study was conducted during information literacy instruction for English 105 classes at the House Undergraduate Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A classroom modeling exercise was developed to help students choose authentic topics of interest. Students then filled out a questionnaire to assess whether choosing authentic topics led to increased engagement and increased learning according to Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards compared to students in the control group. Results were analyzed using an independent samples t-test.

The data illustrate that the exercise successfully helped students choose authentic topics and that these students’ motivation to learn was higher than students in the control group. Students in the experimental group also, on average, rated their learning of ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards significantly higher than students in the control group.

The study provides the first empirical data confirming the positive impact of authenticity on student motivation and learning in the context of information literacy instruction. An implication of the study is that it is possible not only to provide students with resources – as the traditional role of librarians might have it – but also that librarians can have a positive and substantial impact on the content students choose to work on, and the degree to which they care about it. The impact of this particular result could radically change the way instruction librarians view the nature and scope of their pedagogical role in academic libraries.

In 2015, a librarian (Jessica Blackwell) and a course instructor (Trevor Holmes) collaborated to offer experiential opportunities in the archive itself for a large introductory Women’s Studies class. Since then, students from six semesters of the course have worked with primary source materials from the library’s collections. This chapter is a description of practice rather than a formal study. The authors describe design elements from the course, public products of the assignment, and reflections based on observations over time, offering several ways for librarians with access to archival material to co-design assignments with instructors. In the assignment variations, students visit the archive to complete a short transcription or digitization task pre-selected to benefit both the learners’ research skills development and the wider research community. Final products go live online, benefiting the students and the global research community. Then, students link the experience to a course reading in a critically reflective paper. While initially the projects hold barriers for students, in formal and informal reflections they ultimately find it to be a rewarding learning experience. The authors contend that the assignment has significant elements of experiential learning and high-impact practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate information retrieval (IR) in the context of authentic work tasks (WTs), as compared to traditional experimental IR study designs.

The participants were 22 professionals working in municipal administration, university research and education, and commercial companies. The data comprise 286 WTs and 420 search tasks (STs). The data were collected in natural situations. It includes transaction logs, video recordings, interviews, observation, and daily questionnaires.

The analysis included the effects of WT type and complexity on the number of STs, queries, search keys and types of queries. The findings suggest that simple STs are enough to support most WTs. Complex WTs (vs more simple ones) and intellectual WTs (vs communication, support and editing WTs) include more STs than other WT categories.

Further research should address the problems related to controllability of field studies and enhance the use of realistic WT situations in test-based studies, as well.

The study is an attempt to bring traditional IR studies and realistic research settings closer to each other. Using authentic WTs when studying IR is still rare. The representativeness of the WT/ST types used in interactive IR experiments should be carefully addressed: in the work flow, people seldom consciously recognise separate “STs”. This means that STs may mainly be an academic construct even to the point that studying IR without a decent context does violence to the further understanding of the phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of developing an information literacy assessment project, and to discuss key findings from the project.

A variety of assessment tools were used to gather information about student learning and information literacy instruction: pre‐ and post‐surveys, student feedback surveys, faculty feedback to librarians, librarian self‐reflection, library worksheets, student research journals, and citation analysis of students' final research paper bibliographies.

It was found that the authors' initial suite of assessment tools did not provide the information wanted about students' research processes, so the authors' “assessment toolkit” was modified. It was found that more meaningful information could be gathered about students' research processes when the authors worked closely with faculty to embed information literacy assessments into course assignments. From the authors' analysis of student work, it was discovered that, for many students, library instruction was most valuable in helping them refine and explore research topics.

This paper will be useful to librarians and faculty seeking to implement an information literacy assessment project. The authors provide ideas for ways for faculty and librarians to collaborate on information literacy assessment, as well as on assignment and course design.

The purpose of this paper is to share a practical approach to formative, authentic assessment of Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) outcomes within individual sessions of course‐integrated information literacy. This method does not require extra class time and assists librarians in modifying their teaching techniques to improve student learning.

By implementing authentic assessment of worksheets already integrated into library instruction sessions, librarians measure student learning of ACRL outcome 2.2.b “identify keywords, synonyms, and related terms for the information needed.”

Librarians consider this initial foray into authentic assessment a success, with the methodology only requiring a few adjustments. Results of student learning revealed an overall understanding by students of how to identify keywords and synonyms, but uncovered a weakness in topic development.

This study is based on a three‐class sequence of information literacy for freshman composition students. Because of this, librarians can limit the number of outcomes per class, not always an option in one‐shot sessions.

This technique provides a realistic means of assessing student learning of outcomes. Due to the popularity of active learning, many librarians should already have in‐class activities they could easily convert into assessments.

Much research exists on the value and results of authentic assessment. Fewer studies focus on formative, authentic assessment of a specific ACRL outcome, particularly at the individual session‐level.