Library Instruction West 2018

533 students. 32 class sections. 32 different topics, assignments, syllabi, and instructors. 8 instruction librarians. 1 assessment. How do you make sense of this much variety in a first year experience course?

The presenters, librarians at a small liberal arts college, chose to focus on first-year students’ ability to select appropriate resources for research. They launched a pilot program with only a few weeks’ notice, driven by a university assessment mandate, department goals, and librarian curiosity. Using a three-pronged approach, they juggled data from each class section to investigate the correlative effect of library exposure on first year experience student success across these sometimes dramatically different class landscapes (from “writing for social justice” to “fear” to “superheroes” to “digital stories”). The librarians administered a baseline survey during fall library instruction and assessed student research assignments, then collected student and faculty feedback in the spring semester.

Join us for discussion of preliminary results and insight into moving a research project from concept to action to refinement; we will also discuss organizing, question creation, beta testing, IRB process, requesting student assignments and papers from faculty, and the many other variables that found their way into the research process.