Teaching & Assessment in BC Libraries
When we opted into the ACRL “Project Outcome” assessment pilot in Fall 2018, we weren’t sure what to expect either from the survey or from the library teaching staff’s participation. Both were a surprise. The survey itself (both print and online versions) was easy for staff to administer, students filled it out with aplomb, adding many candid comments, and ACRL both provided a summary article and a data dashboard showing results across the country, and sent us a spreadsheet of the data we’d collected from 871 surveys collected from some of the 218 library instruction sessions taught last Fall.
Some of the more common open-ended responses included “do more presentations like this,” “doing a great job” and “make people more aware of services.” The most encouraging response was the 4.6 average (4 is agree, 5 is strongly agree) for “I intend to apply what I just learned.”
That response rate–and the wealth of data provided by just one semester of surveys–prompted a lot of discussion about what to do going forward, and how and whether we could integrate components of Project Outcome into the assessment initiatives we’d already gotten underway.
It isn’t quite the gimme it first appears, because our participation in Project Outcome was just the most recent episode in a longer story about teaching assessment in BC Libraries. In 2013 Margaret Cohen, Head Librarian, Educational Initiatives and Research Services, organized a group of instructional librarians to create teaching goals for the library’s First-Year Writing Seminar (FWS) to establish a set of basic research skills and knowledge other librarians could build on as students progressed in their academic careers, and a short online self-report assessment.
Those goals were revised a few years later to accord with the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy, a more concept-based major overhaul of its earlier skill-based Information Literacy Guidelines. The current FWS goals are a mix of the practical (know how to find a book on the shelf using the call number), and the conceptual (understand that successful searches are iterative). In 2016 librarians developed a student assessment survey for FWS based on those learning outcomes, and have been using that survey consistently since then. Now several years of that assessment data helps inform library instruction across all disciplines and programs, so changing our assessment questions is not something to undertake lightly.
Librarians work with outcomes-based instructional design and assessment, often called “backwards design.” Backwards design consists, in essence, of deciding first on the learning outcomes, skills or ideas you would like students to know, designing evidence and/or creating an assessment, then building the lesson, activities or curriculum . Librarians have been adopting these methods to the extent that they can in single or multiple class sessions.
All of this boils down to questions to consider: do we adopt a somewhat customizable standardized survey developed by the ACRL that provides comparison data with other colleges, or do we continue to use and develop a mix of surveys responsive to internal curricular needs? We’re engaged in ongoing lively discussions about how best to assess how we help students succeed at research. We look forward to more discussions with you. And librarians are, of course, always eager to visit classes for instruction sessions.
