50-minute Ph.D: Or, Assessment for Librarians | Forum

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unCOILed 2011: Get Schooled 9 months ago
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50-minute Ph.D: Or, Assessment for Librarians

Presented by: Sarah Clark

"Instruction Librarians have a problem. They know that information literacy is the most wonderful thing in the universe, or at least a great skill set for helping students learn how to learn. However, Administrators (and to a lesser degree faculty) don’t necessarily understand the importance of these skills to student learning and/or success. The answer? Assessment! But how do you create an effective assessment program that gets at the information you want and enables you to package it in a way that administrators will easily understand? This presentation presents a simplified version of a research design model taught at OSU’s School of Educational Studies that librarians can use in creating an assessment plan. The presentation will also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using external assessment tools or programs like SAILS, RAILS, and LibQUAL. By the end of the hour, librarians will have the tools to
·         state their research problem,
·         formulate questions that, when answered, could solve the problem,
·         select effective quantitative or qualitative research method best suited for answering those questions,
·         execute the research, and
·         create a jargon-free document that presents the library’s information literacy efforts in the strongest way possible.”

unCOILed 2011: Get Schooled 8 months ago
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Assessment is so important anymore- I know a lot of us have been thinking a lot about how to represent what we do to people in administration. I think that learning how to create "jargon-free documents" will really be useful.

Sarah Clark 8 months ago
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What questions would people like answered, or are there any issues/tools you'd like me to discuss specifically? this is a big topic (I just spent a whole semester wrestling with just the basics), but I think anyone can understand the basics of conducting useful research.

pstenis 8 months ago
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I'm always curious about what others are doing. We implemented SAILS last year, and if I recall correctly, used pre- and post- testing. What are some other methods that have been successful? And does it need to be done on a large scale to work?

Jessica E Moad 8 months ago
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I am interested in this as well, and would like to know if you have any advice or warnings about problems or issues that you might have run into while completing your assessment. Also, how do you know if your sample is adequate? And Do you have any resources that you can recommend to help with the assessment, data, or data visualization?

Sarah Clark 8 months ago
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Those are great ideas! We haven't done as much assessment as we would like (yet--that's part of the reason I'm doing this presentation), but I will get into pitfalls we've had with past surveys as well as common issues related to assessment in general. I will definitely add some data visualisation and other handy tools--if anyone knows of any they'd like me to share, please let me know!