Assessment- It Has to Happen

Any librarian will tell you that library assessment is particularly tricky. There are a number of barriers to instruction librarians that keep them from feeling confident in knowing students have learned anything, much less have captured the intended goals of the session.

The most popular method is, of course, surveys. And, of course, there is survey fatigue, for the students who, in this culture of accountability, have to be surveyed for everything: satisfaction with facilities, services, course evaluations, and informational outputs. And, with the typical framework of a one-shot session, it takes time to do incremental assessment as one moves through the assessment (though I argue, as do others, that good instructors to informal assessments all the time and adjust teaching as they go). But most librarians settle for doing pre and post testing, which is not a bad thing and gives good data for justify that library sessions need to continue.

Our worksheet for week two has us identifying our educative assessments and ensuring they map with the Learning Goals from last week.

Procedures for Educative Assessment

• Forward looking assessment- this kind of assessment replicates real world problems students will need to solve. My online orientation course will have many of these kinds of assessments because the overarching goal for the course is being able to identify and use library resources for their research assignments.
• Your professor has asked you to write a review of two scholarly articles relevant to the unit you are studying in class and format the citation in APA. How would you go about completing that assignment?
• The search terms you have used for your article search are not getting good results. What are some strategies to improve your results?

• Include self-assessment. This is what Fink means by "human dimensions goals." I stated in last week's post:

Human Dimensions Goals I hope students learn multiple things about themselves during this course. They should learn what parts of research makes them anxious, what parts of research takes them the most time, and in what kind of environment they can best do their work. This class is an individual learning module, so there will not be an obvious opportunity to work with others.   

• What are you the most proud of learning through this course? Be as specific as you can. 
• In thinking about a research project, what still makes you anxious
• Have you employed an strategies through this course to lessen that anxiety?

• Make criteria and standards clear. I feel like this will be difficult in a non-credit bearing course, but the hope is through the self assessment process, students will understand that they have met some standards for being able to succeed in their research courses.
• Criteria: students will choose a database from which to retrieve scholarly articles
• Passing standard- using the same database for each article and using one refining tool to ensure the article is peer-reviewed.
• Exceptional standard- using two different databases to accomplish the goal.
• Criteria: student will use some available tool to properly cite the articles they found. 
• Passing standard- using the citation tools in provided in the database
• Exceptional standard- importing citations into RefWorks.

• Include feedback using the following procedures: 
   
• I like the idea of badges for completion of different units of the course, so by the end students are a 'research apprentice" or something like that.  A little cheesy, but it adds places for the system to say "you're doing a good job! keep going!"
• Our programs and courses are small, so between the two librarians we should be able to provide FIDEL feedback on those open ended questions as students move through the course. 

Even with all this reading and thinking, creating clear standards for assessments takes time. This is the primary reason assessment doesn't take place, or doesn't change once it's in place. I have the sinking feeling that even in going through this worksheet, my ideas are still too vague. It will be fun to see what my classmates come up with as well.