Bibliographic/Library Instruction Assessment

(From the AIG blog; originally posted February 2008)

February 2008 Discussion Topic:  Bibliographic/Library Instruction Assessment

1. What are your ideas for assessment of bibliographic or library instruction? How can we get away from quantitative assessment—”I taught 27 classes during fall semester”—and incorporate meaningful, qualitative assessment methods that measure instructional effectiveness against factors such as how students are using what they’ve learned?

- I’ve successfully used a web-based evaluation form. Since the students had acces to computers during the session (to follow along) it was easy to direct them to the survey at the end. It was run by survey monkey and it gives instant stats, as soon as the survey is complete. I’ve also thought of  using this same survey (it linked through the college blog) as a kind of quiz at the end – not graded – to see what the students know or have learned. If you wanted to go assessment crazy, you could have a pre and post test of just a few questions.

Here is a link that came through on assessment that showed a comprehensive report on an extended assessment project. Might be a nice template for someone looking to evaluate their BI sessions:  assessment report

-Posted by Jennifer:  In a previous position, I worked with a faculty member who pre- and post-tested her students before brining them for library instruction. Interestingly, she used a general library tutorial that I created (that was in quiz format) as the pre- and post-test. Her students took the quiz prior to library instruction and then again after library instruction. Their test scores did improve, but (to me) the most worthwhile outcome was not assessment-related:  They seemed to pay more attention during library instruction, perhaps because they’d already read about many of the concepts I was presenting.

- Our plan (not there yet) is to use a Blackboard “Library” course page by which students would transmit to the BI librarian citations gathered (after a BI session) for their assignment.  The librarian would then offer feedback to the student on how relevant the cites were, where else they might want to look, etc.  In fact, we might ask the student to send us their bibliography gathered via RefWorks – another tool we teach in BIs.  Faculty here love RefWorks, so it likely would be easy to pull from some test classes.

-Posted by Jennifer:  This sounds like a great idea. Will the citations be annotated?  And what a great way to get students to use RefWorks!

Diane Fulkerson passed along this link to Assessments of Information Literacy, a directory of online assessment tools. You might want to take a look before you create your own pre- or post-test

-Posted by Diane: One issue that came up in a session I attended about assessment at ALA mid-winter was making sure we are doing assessment instead of evaluation. The focus of our assessments should be on what the students come away with from the session and not an evaluation of our teaching style. Several people in the discussion group mentioned they often e-mail the students after the BI session and ask them to write a “one minute paper.” It serves two purposes one it allows more time for the BI session and second it provides feedback to the instructor on what the students learned during the session. I have gone to the one minute paper for my BI session and ask students to include a least one thing I can do to make the class better.

2. What are your ideas for assessing how well library employees are conducting library instruction?

-Posted by Jennifer:  Does anyone use peer evaluation or peer review? I attended a GaCOMO session given by some UGA librarians in which they talked about their peer evaluation program. Just wondering, because some people seem very turned off/threatened by this practice.

-Posted by Diane: I have heard of other schools going to peer evaluation and if you think about it is really that different from submitting an article to a peer reviewed journal? Okay, so you are standing in front of your peers while teaching, but it is also a way for us to improve our teaching skills since we can probably learn from each other.