The Library Instruction (LI) program started using student learning outcomes to design and assess its sessions in 2010. Its earliest assessment tools employed Likert-scaled questions to measure student opinion and a few multiple choice and short answer questions to measure student mastery of the search skills the sessions taught. The assessment matched the curricular focus, and the data was very easily quantified.
In Spring 2016, LI began using simplified rubrics to collaboratively assess Wrap Up form data, which encouraged healthy departmental discussions of findings and practices. However, after a semester of group grading sessions, the librarians came to the conclusion that the forms did not really demonstrate much of what the students could do, given the many steps they will undertake as researching readers and writers after their LI session. The LI Spring 2016 Wrap Up form and a revised Spring 2017 Wrap Up form which employed an auto-feedback quiz format neither required nor demonstrated the grit students need in order to navigate the integrated and recursive process that stretches well beyond the LI session. However, since the Library embraced the Framework and began collaborating with Fearless Learning QEP, the LI curriculum and assessment now delve more deeply into activities that require a synthesis of higher order skills.
To capture key dispositional outcomes, the Spring 2018 Wrap Up form was revised to include: open-ended questions that invite more developed responses, rhetoricized questions that ask students to evaluate and sell best practices to their peers, and process-based questions about their next steps in research. Even though a broader range of more qualitative responses complicates narrower rubric-based assessment, the richness of the responses provides a clearer sense of what students understand and value. Moreover, the opportunity for students to claim ownership of their own learning should not be sidestepped just to ensure a lesson is more assessable.
Early analysis of the LI Spring 2018 Wrap Up responses reveal that SSW completers provide more developed and nuanced answers to the question "Which strategies would you share with another student who is researching the same topic?"
Gathering of data, student artifacts, and analysis will continue through the end of the Fearless Learning QEP and will be included in the accreditation report submitted to SACSCOC.