Summer Projects
Somehow, it's already the second week in July, so with renewed purpose, I'm working on tackling (or at least starting) these three large-scale projects:
Library instruction session assessment
We do a great job of assessing our information literacy program in our freshmen course and upper division writing courses. This year the university is implementing and assessing information literacy as a formal graduation requirement, so the plan is there -- hopefully the data will be there too! Since we librarians teach the freshmen course, we also have course feedback, assignments and grades to use to understand student learning, and our teaching, of information literacy. Our two areas of weakness: Graduate level (addressed later on) and our "one-shot" library instruction sessions. My goal this summer is to do a literature review of library instruction assessment in one-shot courses and to review the data we already track (like what course, how long, what instructor) in order to consider what is meaningful.
Tangentially, my colleague is working on a research project to see the impact of library services on student learning, so he'll be implementing check-ins for reference and instruction interactions. I'm considering, other than the formative feedback we already do in class, what do we want to know about our instruction sessions? If we are gathering snapshots at freshmen and junior levels (and one day, capstone), would a scattershot assessment of student learning in one shots be useful? And if we're trying to assess student learning, do we need to have standardized outcomes? If not, do we want a way for librarians to assess their session-specific outcomes in a formative way? How do we do this without an extra burden? And is it necessary? My hypothesis is that it might be more useful to visualize our current instruction statistics in a more useful way, and to perhaps have the librarians track their goals of the session (without measuring if those goals were met...).
Peer observations
Once upon a time we decided we needed to formalize our peer observations in our department, and so we created a series of forms, and people got busy and now no one is observing anyone. How do we improve this? Some of it was just literally being understaffed, and there was no time when any two people were free to teach a session, but now that we have a full department, I'm hoping to bring this back with rigor.
Information literacy at the graduate level
I just completed outlining the different graduate level programs, their requirements, and our library involvement with each program. Now what? My former colleague who had started working on this project left a folder with research articles on graduate information literacy. I'll read those (in all my spare time!) and craft some sort of next steps...
Library instruction session assessment
We do a great job of assessing our information literacy program in our freshmen course and upper division writing courses. This year the university is implementing and assessing information literacy as a formal graduation requirement, so the plan is there -- hopefully the data will be there too! Since we librarians teach the freshmen course, we also have course feedback, assignments and grades to use to understand student learning, and our teaching, of information literacy. Our two areas of weakness: Graduate level (addressed later on) and our "one-shot" library instruction sessions. My goal this summer is to do a literature review of library instruction assessment in one-shot courses and to review the data we already track (like what course, how long, what instructor) in order to consider what is meaningful.
Tangentially, my colleague is working on a research project to see the impact of library services on student learning, so he'll be implementing check-ins for reference and instruction interactions. I'm considering, other than the formative feedback we already do in class, what do we want to know about our instruction sessions? If we are gathering snapshots at freshmen and junior levels (and one day, capstone), would a scattershot assessment of student learning in one shots be useful? And if we're trying to assess student learning, do we need to have standardized outcomes? If not, do we want a way for librarians to assess their session-specific outcomes in a formative way? How do we do this without an extra burden? And is it necessary? My hypothesis is that it might be more useful to visualize our current instruction statistics in a more useful way, and to perhaps have the librarians track their goals of the session (without measuring if those goals were met...).
Peer observations
Once upon a time we decided we needed to formalize our peer observations in our department, and so we created a series of forms, and people got busy and now no one is observing anyone. How do we improve this? Some of it was just literally being understaffed, and there was no time when any two people were free to teach a session, but now that we have a full department, I'm hoping to bring this back with rigor.
Information literacy at the graduate level
I just completed outlining the different graduate level programs, their requirements, and our library involvement with each program. Now what? My former colleague who had started working on this project left a folder with research articles on graduate information literacy. I'll read those (in all my spare time!) and craft some sort of next steps...
Comments
Post a Comment