Library Instruction: Quantitative Assessment Pre- and Post-Test
Cliff April 23rd, 2008
Getting actual quantitative assessment of library instruction is something that most librarians hate to do–it often eats up our too-precious time with the students. And yet, I find myself dissatisfied with the “how’d I do?” opinion polls that we’ve used in the past.
So as part of our annual goals here at MPOW, we’ve created an online form for students to fill out as a pre- and post-test. The results write to a tab-delimited text file using ProcessForm 3.0.
By including a hidden date and timestamp, we’re able to separate classes as they are added to the text file, and then import them into a spreadsheet for analysis. Couple this with the students’ institutional ID number, and we can compare pre- and post-test scores while keeping the students’ anonymity intact.
With a little help (read: enforcement) from friendly professors, this test could be self-administered before and after the library instruction session to prevent eating into precious library instruction time. Additionally, the test could be performed pre- and post-library instruction, and then again at the end of the semester. Let’s see how much they really retain!
I welcome comments, criticism and suggestions! A big “thank you” to Andy and Sherrida for making this happen, and feel free to steal the code from the assessment form.
Cliff, I am totally going to steal this idea. This would work great as a Blackboard quiz too.
Cliff,
Wonderful use of technology and keen idea to capture individualized results without becoming a “friend to Big Brother.” My question is about the sample of questions. Are you planning to use a rotating base of questions that ask similar things or cover key areas? If not, how are you accounting for the skew from students possible memorizing the questions? Or is that not a concern being that the tests are administered with a semester in between?
Great work.
John
Hey John!
The hope is to eventually develop a test bank of questions and create a series of tests. However, we *do* hope that students learn the content enough that they’ll be able to answer the test questions correctly without memorizing the questions’ answers.
Additionally, since they aren’t provided the correct answers, they never know if they’ve chosen the “right” one–since we’re not grading them but using them for assessment, there is no “right” one. If we delivered the information properly, they should know the answer, but if we did not, they won’t. If they choose incorrectly, it reflects poorly on us, not them.
Cliff
Hi Cliff,
Great idea! I’ve been pushing my librarians to do quick/easy little assessments like this for a couple of semesters now but in paper format. Doing it electronically has posed the same probs you mention here. I’d never thought of using a timestamp…that’s brilliant! I wish my institution had “instructional id #’s” with which to track pre/post assessments while maintaining anonymity. We use their network UN’s for everything here, which would only provide confidentiality in an assessment situation like this. Regardless, I may tackle a similar project now by stealing your timestamp idea.
Thanks!
Dan