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The library must
When creating outcomes, the library should consider the wishes of the stakeholders. The administration may dictate specific goals for the library that need to be assessed. Students and patrons of the library may report specific wants and desired benefits of library services. And library faculty may be aware of specific learning needs of library patrons and students. All of these should be considered when crafting appropriate library outcomes.
To select outcomes, a library should do an assessment audit.
There are two types of outcomes.
Library assessment publications on outcomes-based evaluation tend to focus on either learning outcomes or program outcomes. It is difficult to find a publication that merges the two perspectives.
The library cannot assess EVERYTHING. Therefore, the outcomes should reflect the most important things. Library faculty should discuss and agree on what are the most important outcomes for student learning and library services. If there is no discussion, there may be no buy-in and there may be little support for the assessment plan. If there is no discussion, different interpretations of the outcomes may exist that will not be discovered until after you've gone through the trouble of collecting data that is inconsistent and unusable.
Sometimes librarians and employees do not wish to have a discussion about goals, objectives, and outcomes.
“I already know what is important. We don’t have to discuss it.”
A rule of thumb would be to limit the library to 3-7 outcomes maximum. This will help keep the library from taking on too much work. Note that the ACRL Information Literacy Standards include five standards. These are further broken down and defined, but five is a reasonable number.
Student learning outcomes should describe what students should be able to know and do by the time they graduate from the university. As tenure-track professional librarians, the library faculty should discuss and agree upon these student learning outcomes based upon their knowledge of their discipline.
Library departments with instructional goals should craft learning outcomes to decribe the intended result of teaching or training interactions. Learning outcomes identify the knowledge, skills, attitudes or behaviors students or stakeholders will exhibit. The proper wording focuses on what students or stakeholders learn rather than on what the department is teaching. One can teach without resulting in learning.
"The student will be able to identify scholarly journals and popular magazines."
The university administration is interested in the assessment of an information literacy or training program. It is not focused on the assessment of individual instruction sessions or courses. The reason for this is that the university understands that learning is a complicated process. Test questions may be answered but not understood. Topics may be learnt and then forgotten. Topics may be introduced but not fully understood until later. The university administration is interested in what students know by the time they graduate. The library has time to introduce topics and provide opportunities for practice and reinforcement over time.
However, the departments and library faculty may also be interested in assessment of library instruction sessions and other activities and services. After all, if students are not information literate by graduation, libraries want to know where the probem(s) may be occurring. Faculty may try different teaching strategies and not all will be successful. Intermediate assessment at different times in the students' ISU experience can help determine whether specific instruction strategies are successful. They can inform librarians where specific weaknesses lie and what or when students have forgotten. They can help refine strategies and help weed out unsuccessful services and activities.
“Educators do not teach and then assess; nor do they think of assessment as something that is done to students. Instead, they consider the assessment activity itself an instructional episode.”
Arter, J. A. (1996). Using assessment as a tool for learning. In R. E. Blum & J. A. Arter (Eds.), A handbook for student performance in an era of restructuring (Vol. IV–10, p. 1). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
To select appropriate student learning outcomes, the library faculty will want to consider the ACRL Standards on Information Literacy. However, ACRL has 5 standards, 22 performance indicators, and 87 outcomes. This may be too many to assess within a reasonable workload. For this reason, library faculty should select what they consider to be the most important things that they wish students to learn by the time they graduate. An academic library need not feel obligated to assess every single ACRL outcome. And that's okay.
Learning outcomes should use appropriate verbage chosen from Bloom's Taxonomy. These action verbs reflect levels of knowledge and what students or stakeholders will say or do that make evident that they have achieved a learning outcome.
Program outcomes reflect the intended benefits and effects of library services upon library patrons. Program outcomes may encompass the most important results or impacts that should occur as a result of a unit’s activities, a critical work process and how it should function, or what stakeholders experience through interaction with a unit. The two types of program outcomes are process outcomes and satisfaction outcomes.
Consider the mission and the strategic plan of the university when writing your outcomes. These represent things that are important to the university. If the library can tie its outcomes back to the university mission and strategic plan, it may be more successful in gaining the attention and appreciation of the university administration.
Process outcomes are what the unit intends to accomplish. They may reflect a level or volume of an activity, the efficiency with which a unit conducts a process, or compliance with external standards or regulations.
Satisfaction outcomes reflect how those served by the unit rate their satisfaction with the unit’s processes or services.
Optimally, the library assessment plan would include a mix of both process and satisfaction outcomes. The library wants to know both whether patrons appreciate services and also whether services are accomplishing what the library desires.
