Category Archives: Assessment

What do you want to learn next?

At my very last instruction session for this semester (which was on December 2 — possibly a new record for latest instruction session in the semester) I had a brilliant idea for an alternative to the Minute Paper1 for an end-of-session formative assessment, which was to ask students to write down the answer to one […]

Some new things I’m trying this semester

My last three posts have been about new things I tried last semester, and how they worked out. Now I’m going to talk a little bit about new things I’m trying this semester, and what I’m hoping for them. Digression: I realized about a year ago that I needed a bit more structure to thinking […]

Some new things I tried this semester: the failed experiment

The third new thing I tried in the fall semester was to incorporate different formative classroom assessment techniques, in addition to my old standby, the minute paper.1  Minute papers are great, don’t get me wrong, and I’ve learned a ton of stuff from them, but there are other tools out there that you can learn […]

Some new things I tried this semester, Part 2: Summative assessment

So in addition to trying out a new lesson plan concept this semester, I also screwed up my courage and asked a few of the faculty I worked with to share their students’ bibliographies from the papers or projects they worked on. This is part of a concerted effort on my part to add summative […]

ACRL Webcast: Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction

So, remember those two presentations I did last fall?  Well, I’ll be reworking and expanding that content, and delivering it as a webcast for ACRL’s e-Learning program on Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 p.m. EDT: “Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction: Are They Learning What You’re Teaching?” If you want to learn more about formative […]

Conference Presentation Feedback, Part 8: Getting All Meta

(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) Well, this is the final post in the series, and I thought I would wrap up with one last thought, which is to point out that this entire series has been enabled by the minute paper assessments that I got back at the end of […]

Conference Presentation Feedback, Part 7: But will it get me tenure?

(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) One question that got asked over and over again was essentially, “how can I use this information in my annual performance review and/or my tenure portfolio?”  And that’s an excellent question!  It’s common practice for teaching faculty members to include course evaluations as part of […]

Conference Presentation Feedback, Part 6: Self-reporting vs. “actual” assessment

(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) I got several comments on my presentation that were roughly analogous to this one, which I am quoting exactly (the emphasis is in the original): So, to me, they’re still evals of what students think they’re learning, not whether or not they’re actually learning. So, […]

Conference Presentation Feedback, Part 5: Print journals?

(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) So the first example I used in my presentation was a collection of excerpts from minute papers that eventually convinced me that a large portion of our students, given a journal article citation, don’t know how to find it in a collection of bound print […]

Conference Presentation Feedback, Part 4: Scalability and Sustainability

(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) As the sole instruction librarian at my library (among a staff of seven), scalability and sustainability are really important to me.  So when I saw comments to the effect of: well, it’s lovely that you’re able to do this at your itty bitty liberal arts […]