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.<\/p>\n
NT:<\/strong> What were you trying to learn by conducting this assessment?<\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n NT:<\/strong> How did you choose your assessment method?<\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> 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\u2019 skills in information literacy.<\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n NT:<\/strong> Right. You can\u2019t necessarily generalize about all the faculty from these responses. So what did you learn from the feedback?<\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> Most of the respondents are aware of the library\u2019s services, but they don\u2019t 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 \u201cdrop in.\u201d 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n NT:<\/strong> Will you make any changes based on what you learned?<\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> Definitely. I\u2019ll make sure that instructors know that I can come in for just a few minutes to introduce myself and be visible. I\u2019ll focus my outreach efforts towards those classes that were identified as having a research component.<\/p>\n NT:<\/strong> If you did this process again, is there anything you\u2019d do differently?<\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> I was pretty happy with the questions that I asked. It got me the information I was looking for. I think that I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading