CIRI Blog: Assessment and Research Methods

Published: May 13th, 2024 by Irene Miller

[Irene was an active participant in CPGE Online Student Conference, the annual college-wide conference that aims to showcase student work and provide a space for students to network. She presented at both the 2023 and 2024 conference and her work drew much attention from the CPGE student community. CIRI had the pleasure of interviewing her about her reflections on the conference experience.]

Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Irene and I live in Washington State. After completing a seemingly arbitrary collection of courses including several foreign languages, biological sciences, and

Published: October 18, 2022 by Dr. Donald Westbrook

I thoroughly enjoy teaching the Historical Research section for INFO 285: Applied Research Methods at SJSU. Students come into this class from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and no prior academic training in history is required. As I like to say near the beginning of the course, the study of history involves much more than memorizing “facts and figures.” Historical research is interdisciplinary, multifaceted, and global in reach.

Published: November 22, 2021 by Dr. Renée Jefferson

I love teaching the action research special topics section of INFO 285: Applied Research Methods because it is engaging, empowering, and motivating.  It is engaging to work with students as they discover how action research empowers them to examine policies and practices using sound methodologies, and how it motivates them to make evidence based decisions.  In this course, we cover the fundamental principles, processes, value

Published: January 23, 2020 by Ann Agee 

When two people are deep in conversation, they unconsciously mimic each other. Both will cross their arms, pick up their coffee cups, or touch their hair as they talk. Research shows that this mimicry is a signal of the high level of engagement between the conversationalists (Scheflen, 1964). Using a technique called language style matching (LSM), social psychologists discovered that similar synchronization appears in written correspondence (Niederhoffer & Pennebaker, 2002). Correspondents with a high level of engagement use similar words, down to the level of pronouns, articles, and prepositions. It is these function words that are used to calculate an LSM score. High LSM scores have been shown to be indicative of a sense of perceived support.

Published: September 30, 2015 by Dr. Lili Luo

International collaboration is always a refreshing and even enlightening experience to me. I have worked with two librarians from Tsinghua University Library in China on a couple of projects and absolutely enjoyed it. I have known them for more than 10 years so we have a very efficient and pleasant relationship. Last year when I was at IFLA, I met a librarian from Ghana and we had good conversations about library research. This spring we worked on a project together to evaluate the reference services at University of Education, Winneba (UEW) in Ghana. We decided to approach the evaluation from the user perspective, and identified the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on the RUSA Guidelines for Behavioral Performance.

Published: August 25, 2015 by Dr. Chris Hagar

One of my main research interests focuses on information perspectives of digital volunteering in humanitarian aid. My work with colleagues Dr. Nina Laurie, Chair in Development, Newcastle University, UK and Dr. Matt Baillie-Smith, Professor of Development, Northumbria University, UK concerns international medical volunteering. Cross-disciplinary collaboration (medical, geography, sociology and information science) is urgently needed to better understand global health volunteering. My expertise in crisis information management helped my colleagues (mentioned above) to identify a gap in their work and, as a result, we have discussed ways in which we can take forward a joint agenda on information/knowledge sharing and digital volunteering in international development settings.