Theory vs practice & a tour topic idea. . .

This past week I spent wed/thu/fri riding from Burlington to Kinston (part of cycle north Carolina). While the primary goal of the trip was entertainment/exercise, I also setup a secondary goal of catching up on some optional reading and filling in what I saw as some gaps with regards to my understanding of research methods. I focused on several chapters from a book on social science research methods & made it through some overview material on quantitative/qualitative research. In conjunction with this I have been reading the chapters from the handbook on evidence based librarianship & considering 'tour topics.' Having hit week 6 already it is beginning to look as if the semester will be quickly complete & I wanted to be sure that I was considering these topics early enough in the semester. .

I found the chapters on EBL very interesting in the quantifiable question approach (is it true/relevant, is it reproducible, is it applicable) & was wondering if/how this approach to what Bruce & Bice refer to as 'Critical Appraisal' could be implemented in an Information Literacy class. Their differentiation between extensive (authority, reliability) and intensive (validity, methodology) is an interesting way of grouping the evaluative questions (authorship, authority, relationship to other literature, perspective, bias) often used in info lit classes and might provide a more useful structure for thinking about evaluation in general.

I was also intrigued by the discussion of how librarians should/could integrate research review into their work & planning processes. This touches on a continuing push & pull (from my perspective) regarding the use of research/theory in LIS communities, the emphasis/lack of continuing education/certification in LIS, and the use of structured (quantitative) evaluative measures vs. more unstructured (qualitative). Perhaps each of these issues are unrelated but it seems that the opposites of each issue describe polar LIS communities (practice based, skill-centered continuing education, casual observation evaluation (direct usage statistics)) vs (theory fueled, externally conceived continuing education, more structured observation (user ‘research’, LibQual)).

In relation to this idea i have been wondering how I might be able to use the information from information literacy class syllabi in conjunction with student reviews to draw parallels between practical/theoretical content in information literacy courses and student reactions to them. The content of the syllabi could provide data regarding the relationship between theory/research & practical instruction offered in the class (in the form of class topics/readings) while student reviews could provide the user reaction to these combinations. My dataset could be the syllabi & reviews from the last 6 semesters of information literacy courses. I could quantify the subject matters addressed in each class & attempt to label each subject section as either a practical or theoretical centered topic (find a book (practical), what is information literacy (theoretical)). It might be difficult to specifically tie student comments to courses/topics but two of the questions on the evaluation form asks students to comment specifically on what they found most useful/least useful in the class. These two questions could provide some data regarding their opinion about the usefulness of specifically mentioned topics or the orientation of the course in general. I suspect that it will be possible to distinguish student reactions to course content but it could also be that attempting to segment topics into practical/theoretical introduces too many subjective decisions.

Is this a specific enough/too specific question? Is it answerable? How would the results be useful?