Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants

Can Data Drive Success? Implementing Instruction Evaluation Forms

Department

University Libraries

College

University Libraries

Date Range

2014-2015

Disciplines

Education

Abstract

A committee comprised of seven Research and Instruction Librarians at Grand Valley State University met to analyze, evaluate, and recommend changes to a newly-implemented librarian instruction evaluation form. Prior to the creation of this form, instruction assessment forms were used on an individual, ad hoc basis for personal self-evaluation. In 2010, there was a grassroots effort to trial a standardized form, but it did not result in widespread adoption among teaching librarians beyond the duration of the project. In 2013, with a formal Instruction Program in place, there was renewed interest in creating an effective, sustainable, and practical library assessment that could be adopted by our colleagues. We wished to scale up from unshared, nonstandard evaluations to a standard evaluation form that would make student perceptions of library instruction more widely accessible to all instructors in order to make data driven decisions within our Instruction Program. For this reason, the Head of Instructional Services created an instruction evaluation form based on a combination of common library instruction evaluations, current evaluations in use in other GVSU programs, and research on student confidence. The intent of this trial was threefold: to test the utility of the web-based form itself, to examine the data to determine whether the form was collecting usable information, and to summarize the findings and make recommendations. More broadly, we wanted to adopt a best practice within our profession. During the 2013 trial, instruction librarians asked students to complete the evaluation by providing the link to the form either in a class session or asynchronously. The data was collected using LibAnalytics software. Numerical data was analyzed using basic statistics and Excel PivotTables. Qualitative data was coded by the committee for statistical analysis. Our preliminary findings consist of 680 student evaluation forms from September 6 through October 1, 2013. Moving forward, connecting evaluation forms to course and section number would allow librarians to compare student responses to other data sets in Libanalytics including our instruction statistics and consultations. One key to this ongoing trials success has been the development of a data driven culture within our Instruction Program, due in part to our newly established Head of Instructional Services. Other institutions can learn from our librarys first attempt at utilizing a standard library instruction evaluation form (2010) and a second more successful implementation (2013) along with future recommendations that we will share.

Conference Name

Library Assessment Conference (LAC)

Conference Location

Seattle, WA, United States

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