You are welcome. I appreciate your interest and comment.

I am glad you asked about next steps for the protocol. I do intend for the instruments to be of practical use to libraries. I am still working on the details of how that will be done.

I am finishing data collection for the 2011 projects this week and planning new projects for the coming year. Those projects are just taking shape but will likely involve repeat studies in history, extending the protocol to other disciplines, and/or experimenting with ways to link ULI data with assessment results.

Again, thank you for your post.

Derek

Thanks for a throught-provoking post about library instruction and impact.

Question: Are you doing more studies as a follow up to your initial study?

Are you willing to share your new suite of instruments with other institutions?

I’ve been thinking about Sarah’s question over the weekend as well.

So why the capstone experience? The current study deployed the ULI protocol to detect links between library use and student learning outcomes that are highly valued by stakeholders in our 4-year institutions: the broad abilities and discipline-specific competencies expected of college graduates.

As our library assessment resources are finite, the capstone form’ of the ULI protocol focuses on specific ‘high-impact’ experiences — in this case upper-level and capstone coursework — where stakeholder expectations, student effort, and faculty assessment of student work converge. For these reasons, I believe a focus on these experiences provides an excellent opportunity to detect credible and authentic evidence of library contributions to these learning outcomes.

However, the capstone experience is only one of several ‘high-impact’ practices linked to higher levels of retention and engagement as reported by George Kuh, cited in footnote 23 above,
and listed at (see http://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm). Other high-impact practices include first-year experiences, writing intensive courses, undergraduate research, and service learning to name a few.

Many of our campuses engage in ‘high-impact practices’ and run other programs which are intended to support a variety of student outcomes and learning outcomes such as those mentioned by Sarah. It seems to me that focusing on student experiences in these programs should be fruitful for detecting library impact on associated outcomes.

I think the ULI protocol and other tools could be appropriate methods depending on the context and the outcomes in question.

Derek

Thank you for your note and great question.

I would approach this first, by getting involved with local initiatives. The library should be engaging with faculty, the student life office, academic advising, coordinators of general ed programs to become an active part of the campuses’ intervention strategy. As you note students can’t benefit from college if they do not return.

Measuring the impact is a different challenge. When approaching a problem like this I recommend that the library adopt metrics already in place within the institution. If the institution has a major initiative underway to increase retention, then the library should seek connections with that measure.

If the institution has general education goals and assessment regimes in place, then I would try to link the library assessment program into those initiatives. In this case, the library needs to be ready to answer the question:

“How did our involvement in the xyz intervention program help achieve the goals of our parent institution?”

This is hard work but staff in institutional research or assessment offices may already be trying to answer these questions. So again, partnering with other units on campus can help bring expertise to the library assessment program. This effort will simultaneously bring the library into conversations about an issue of critical importance to the campus.

I can also recommend a paper presented by Craig Gibson and Christopher Dixon regarding measuring academic library engagement that you may find helpful http://bit.ly/kCwQFC.

Lastly, I am happy to hear about your interest in working on challenges faced by non-traditional students. In one of my pilot studies I found that non-traditional students face unique challenges and value library support tremendously. I’ve implemented a non-traditional student scale in my protocol so I can explore in my dataset the challenges non-traditional students face, differences in their preferences, and ways the library helps them.

I think we need more research on what really matters to this growing population to help us shape library services to meet their needs. This is one of our big opportunities, in my opinion.

Good luck in your work.

Derek

These are challenging times and there is a lot of interesting work to be done.

Derek

You mention that the capstone and upper-division classes are the best place to assess student learning, citing Astin (who I need to read), and Pascarella & Terenzini (who I have read). My Day Job is Access Services & Distance learning librarian at a small regional public university that serves a largely working class and ‘nontraditional’ population. I would argue that these are the types of students who could be helped the most by increased student learning, and yet, less than half of them graduate or transfer out within 6 years. How does the library best intervene in student learning before they give up, and how do we assess that intervention?

Great article – thank you for the insight.