Evaluation Form for a One-credit Information Literacy Course

Last year I taught a one-credit, information-literacy course for the first time.  As an experimental course it was sponsored by ISU's Student Success Center. It was titled ACAD 1199: Information Research and ran during the last eight weeks of the semester, meeting twice a week.  In the first semester I created a student evaluation form to gather information from the students to understand how much work they put into the course, how effective the professor was, and how useful the course was overall.  This was an important thing to do as it gave me firsthand feedback directly from the students.

It is a bit lengthy, but I wanted to get a lot of information from the students before they left.  Have you created your own evaluation form, or do you administer one created by your institution?

Gathering Feedback with Free Online Tools

Polldaddy.com, LetsGoVote.com, and Polleverywhere.com all offer free online software to let anyone in the world create online polls.  Personally, I have more experience with Polldaddy.com and the surveys, polls, and ratings I can create and share online.  LetsGoVote and PollEverywhere let users create polls that can be answered with cell phones that can text message responses. 

Because cell phones are nearly ubiquitous and text messaging is definitely mainstream (at least in the United States), providing quick polls that can be answered with text messaging makes sense.  Most college students have cell phones, so these spontaneous polls can be created "on the fly" in the classroom for immediate feedback to the instructor. 

Students do not always want to answer questions in front of their peers for fear of being embarrassed after a wrong answer or too much attention from the instructor.  Text messaging lets students answer anonymously, still giving the instructor a sense for the understanding of his/her class.

A couple of years back, I got excited about Google Documents, and the surveys, quizzes, or polls that can be created with them.  I had forgotten about them, recalling how clunky and unintuitive they were to use and create, but I have taken another look at them recently.  They are free.  With that in mind, it takes a few more steps to get some things accomplished.  The results of a survey are listedin a spreadsheet format; however, the three tools listed above can automatically display results in visual graphs, which are much more appealing. 

Still, a lot can be done with Google Documents, and I do not believe that users are limited to a certain number or responses received to polls/quizzes/surveys or number of surveys created.  On the other hand, the three tools mentioned above do limit users to 100 responses a month, or 20 responses per survey, or 40 audience members per poll. 

Below is a presentation I created for a workshop yesterday:

Gather Immediate Feedback Online, in the Classroom, and with Mobile Technology

View more PowerPoint from Spencer Jardine

What do you think of online surveys? Do you create polls to gather feedback? Are they helpful? How?

Ratings Widget in Polldaddy

I am trying a new thing with the ratings widget from polldaddy.com.  I hope this works.

Do you like to rate things? How often do you take surveys? For many, I can think of teachers, authors, and business owners, it is important to get feedback to know how effective your efforts are. For teachers, understanding your audience can really enhance your ability to teach them what they need. In a library instruction setting this can be quite valuable.

When writing a blog, feedback can give the blogger or author a sense for who and how they are reaching their audience.  It is nice that Polldaddy is free, though it has limited offerings.

Please rate this post below and add a comment. I would like to see how well the widget works.

Analyzing Library Skills Survey Results

Following are the questions included in a recent survey designed for a class that met in the Library for instruction.

1. How do you keep the related terms grouped together in a search statement? Results
2. What will a truncation or wildcard symbol do?  Results
3. Which Boolean operator reduces the number of results the more times it is used between search terms?  Results
4. Which Boolean operator will typically return the largest set of results?  Results
5. When you need to find the full text of an article for which you already have the full citation, which tool works the best?  Results
6. Have you had library instruction before?  Results
7. Do you understand the assignment for this class? Results
8. Which of these databases have you used? Results
9. Have you chosen a disability to research for the assignment in this class? If so, which one? Results
10. What one thing would you like to learn today?  Results

For several of the responses it appears that a good number chose the correct answer, but the majority did not answer it right.  Ten out of 18 seem to know that parentheses keep related words grouped together in a search statement.  Only seven understand that a truncation code (the asterisk in most databases *) will help find variations on a word. 

Question 3 provided two correct answers, so I should have thought through that a bit more.  Both the Boolean operators AND and NOT will continue to reduce your results.  If I did this again, I would delete the operator NOT from the list of possible choices.

Eight correctly chose OR as the operator that brings back more results, while nine chose AND.  Only five selected the A-Z Journal List as the place to go to find the full text of an article.  This is one of the least understood research tools on our campus, so it is no wonder.  We need to do better at instructing students on its use.  Ten students chose the library catalog as the place to go for the full text, two chose Google or Google Scholar, and one said their smart phone. 

Fifteen stated that they had received library instruction before, though 11 said it was a long time ago.  One claimed that he/she could teach the class, because he/she had attended so many times.  This is the person that I need to involve in teaching the class.  How can I do that?  I need to get the students to teach each other.

Admittedly, I goofed on the database question, not making it possible for them to select more than one database, so this was not as accurate as it should have been.  Still, it gives me a sense for which databases they know.

I wish I had looked at the answers for question #9 and searched the topic(s) they entered in the survey.  Indubitably, this is a learning experience for me.  They wanted learn more about Down Syndrome, Asperger's Syndrome, and prominent persons like athletes with disabilies.

Photo found on Aspergers and the Alien blog written by Amy Murphy.

Following are the comments provided when asked what they wanted to learn in the class:

• I would like to learn more about notable figures who have down syndrome
• how to find articles that are to the point
• Find reliable and easy to read sources
• find articles on Downs
• I would like to find an athlete that i would like to report on
• i would like to learn how these data bases can help me find valid information quickly and effectively.

It strikes as interesting that bullet points two and three speak to the challenge of finding reliable, credible, and scholarly sources that are easy to read or understand.  It seems that many of today's college students really struggle reading the peer-reviewed articles.  This is something I encountered during the one-credit course I taught last semester.  In fact, one of my colleagues has begun to conduct some research on the reading levels of college students.  Well, this is a hard thing to gauge, so she has gathered their bibliographies that are attached to actual research papers and calculated the reading levels of the articles they cite.  I'm uncertain whether or not she includes the grades they receive on the paper, which might offer clues on their comprehension of the cited sources, but it seems she has not as that may conflict with policies governing research subjects. 

Anyway, reading abilities, or the lack thereof, do inhibit many college students from succeeding in higher education.

Young Girl Reading by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. Photo by Cliff1066 on Flickr.com.

Library Instruction for English Composition Courses

I recently read an article worth sharing with others in the Loex Quarterly newsletter.  JaNae Kinikin and Shaun Jackson, of Weber State University wrote the article titled: "Using a Back and Forth Presentation Format to Engage Students in Introductory English Composition Courses." 

If you have ever wondered how to create a standardized library instruction session, this article should give you some good ideas.  They have created a PowerPoint presentation that unifies the instruction.  More interestingly, the article focuses on how they have sought for input and feedback from students in their classes to drive the type of instruction they offer.  Understanding how they used to solicit feedback and how they do it now is quite useful.  They now use TurningPoint software, which seems to be quicker than the "raise your hands if question B applies to you" method. 

Finding out if students know and understand how to search the catalog and the databases can be helpful in gearing the instruction to the students' needs.  The authors wrote:

The interactive nature of the presentation from the very beginning makes the sessions more informal and results in students being more comfortable in asking questions when given time to complete their worksheets.

They suggest that a little bit of humor be inserted into the answers.  To the question: "Have you ever used a library catalog?"  Students could choose among these three options:

1. Yes
2. No
3. What the heck is a library catalog?

According to the authors, this teaching method has improved their teaching experience.

See Flickr.com.  Photo by prettydaisies.