Jackie Sipes is the Education Liaison and Emerging Technologies Librarian in Research and Instruction Services (Paley Library). Towards the end of the spring semester, Jackie conducted a survey of the faculty in the department of teacher education. Nancy Turner asked her about this assessment project.
NT: What were you trying to learn by conducting this assessment?
JS: I’ve been here for just under two years, and I wanted to learn more about the kinds of research-based assignments being used in the teacher education program. I felt like I hadn’t yet made inroads into the program, either with faculty and students. I wanted to find out about their needs in library instruction and student research support. This was also a way of letting faculty learn about me and what I can do for them. I also wanted to know about specific courses being taught that incorporated research assignments.
NT: How did you choose your assessment method?
JS: I chose to conduct a survey because it would reach the greatest number of faculty and could be brief and unobtrusive. I chose to focus just on faculty so that I could tailor the questions to get their impression of how they felt about their students’ skills in information literacy.
I was a little disappointed in the number of responses I got (9) but the information I gathered is very useful. Something is better than nothing!
NT: Right. You can’t necessarily generalize about all the faculty from these responses. So what did you learn from the feedback?
JS: Most of the respondents are aware of the library’s services, but they don’t feel they have time to incorporate a full-blown instruction session in their schedule. So I will be emphasizing to them the other ways I can connect with their classes and students, like a 5-minute “drop in.” While most of our instruction sessions teach students how to locate scholarly articles, I learned that teacher education students are often required to find other types of materials as well: lesson plans, curriculum documents, or general subject information with which they can build a lesson plan. So I’ll start incorporating those types of searches into my instruction. And I learned that there may be a different use of language in describing a research assignment. For instance, students might be required to do an assessment of a classroom intervention.
NT: Will you make any changes based on what you learned?
JS: Definitely. I’ll make sure that instructors know that I can come in for just a few minutes to introduce myself and be visible. I’ll focus my outreach efforts towards those classes that were identified as having a research component.
NT: If you did this process again, is there anything you’d do differently?
JS: I was pretty happy with the questions that I asked. It got me the information I was looking for. I think that I’ll try conducting the survey in the beginning of the semester next time. The survey could be part of my outreach e-mails where I let faculty know about what the library can do for them.