Assessment Update – Spring 2017

Patricia L. Gregory, Assistant Dean for Library Assessment

In considering the question of how the library can contribute to overall university assessment efforts, the Pius/Medical Center Libraries Assessment Committee has been working on a pilot project with English 1900/1920 classes and how effective their library instruction sessions are for their current assignments and for their long-term learning. Reference and Instruction librarians met twice with each of 30 classes during fall semester, and then during spring semester, they met with 31 more of these classes. After the second meeting with each group, the librarians administered 1-minute papers asking these questions:

1. Which concept presented did you find most useful?
2. How will you apply this concept in your course?
3. What information covered is still unclear to you?

While the Assessment Committee was awaiting the results of all the 1-minute papers, we spent time learning more about assessing information literacy , collecting student artifacts related to student learning outcomes, and creating rubrics for evaluating student projects. The committee formed a journal club to present information on relevant articles. Chris Grabau, Instructional Developer at the Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, met twice with the committee to speak about assessment techniques for information literacy skills and about the preliminary results of the 1-minute papers.

After all the data from both semesters is analyzed and reported, the Assessment Committee hopes that the results will be useful for future assessment of other classes taught by subject librarians in both Pius and the Medical Center libraries.