Educators team up for students’ success
Dr. Michelle Judice and Dr. Yumi Shin of Lamar State College Port Arthur will be honored by the Texas Library Association in March for their study on the positive impact of library instruction on College English students.
A couple of Doctors of Education have come up with the right prescription for interdepartmental cooperation at Lamar State College Port Arthur.
Dr. Yumi Shin, Coordinator of References and Access Services at Gates Memorial Library, and Associate English Professor Dr. Michelle Judice collected data on the positive impact of library instruction on student writing at the two-year college level.
The Texas Library Association has selected their paper for presentation at their March convention and publication in this summer’s Texas Library Journal.
The two educators discovered an 85 percent improvement in grades for English papers written by Judice’s Fall 2019 students after Shin offered the students instruction in how to find books and scholarly articles in the campus’ Gates Memorial Library. The librarian’s instruction also included tips on how to follow the Modern Language Association (MLA) format for academic papers.
“The caliber of the papers I received after she did her presentation was just dramatically different,” said Judice, who has taught English to dual-credit high schoolers and two-year college students at LSCPA for 16 years.
“I told Yumi, ‘You wouldn’t believe how much good you did coming and talking to my class.’ She said, ‘We ought to look at that.’”
Shin, working at Gates Library since 2017, wrote a proposal a year ago for a study during the 2019-2020 school year and submitted it to the TLA. She won the organization’s Vivian Greenwood Award which came with a $1,500 grant for Kindle readers and other library supplies designed to help motivate and teach the college’s 600-plus dual-credit high schoolers to visit and use the library.
“The most important classes for library instruction are English classes, because they require research papers,” Shin said. “Once we get this study’s final numbers, I want to show them to other faculty and expand more library classes to other subject areas, like nursing or psychology, or others.”
