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ALI Assessment Committee: Assessment Tools and Methodologies

ALI Assessment Committee, created 2016

Establish a Culture of Assessment

Assessment is a comprehensive, systematic and continuous activity. A culture of assessment is an ongoing process whereby institutional faculty and staff know and care what assessment results are produced, how these relate to desired outcomes (institutional / organization / programmatic), and are committed to using results for continuous improvement.

Large-scale surveys exist to gather information at the organizational or institutional level, but so do many tools that you can profitably use to gather informal data on information literacy as well as particular aspects of your library.

Tools for Informal Assessment

Are students learning? Is your information literacy program successful? How do you know?

Are users satisfied with your library programs and services? The building? How do you know?

The process of data collection does not have to be long or arduous. Polls and surveys are useful for gathering data in a variety of ways. The assessment tools below can be used in the classroom or on webpages for instant responses or over a period of time.

  • Doodle: more than a scheduling system, you can enter free text in the question boxes
  • Google Forms: create polls and distribute via email or URLs
  • Poll Everywhere: clicker-free classroom response system; get quick responses from users as they navigate the library's page
  • Socrative: real-time answers in classes
  • StrawPoll: create real-time polls
  • SurveyMonkey: get answers to questions with real-time data
  • Verso: designed for flipped classrooms and integrates well with Google Drive

 

Definitions

Course mapping. Matching the student learning outcomes of a required course to the program learning outcomes of the degree program.

Formative assessment. Measures what students are learning and allows you to modify your teaching mid-stream.

Goals. Broad statements that describe the overarching long-range intended outcomes of an administrative unit. These are usually not measurable and are primarily used for general planning.

Learning objective. A learning objective is a specific statement that describes what the student is to learn, understand, or to be able to do as a result of a lesson or a series of lessons. (Synonymous with Outcomes.)

Rubric. A rubric is a chart or plan that identifies criteria for evaluating a piece of a student's work, be it an essay test, a paper, or some other student production.

Summative assessment. Measures what students have learnt and includes capstone projects and presentations.

Books

Articles

Gariepy, Laura W., Jennifer A. Stout, and Megan L. Hodge. "Using Rubrics to Assess Learning in Course-Integrated Library Instruction." portal: Libraries and the Academy 16, no. 3 (2016): 491-509.

Kiel, Stephen "Mike", Natalie Burclaff, and Catherine Johnson. "Learning by Doing: Developing a Baseline Information Literacy Assessment." portal: Libraries & the Academy 15, no. 4 (2015): 747-766.

Luther, Michael. "Total Library Assessment." Journal of Library Administration 56, no. 2 (2016): 158-170.