By Jaimie Donnelly & Cara Berg
INTRODUCTION
In July 2012 two New Jersey academic librarians, both from private small institutions, presented posters at the annual VALE Assessment Conference. Cara Berg (formerly Cara Scotto), Information Literacy Librarian at Felician College, presented a poster on an evaluation on the information literacy instruction and quizzes provided to her first year college students. Jaimie Donnelly, Technical Services and Social Sciences Librarian and Transfer Seminar instructor at Georgian Court University, presented a poster on a sample study of the results of online information literacy tutorial quizzes given to transfer students during a transfer seminar course.Both of our posters targeted the assessment of students in unique populations- freshmen and transfers. Both populations are attending these institutions for the first time and come with unique challenges to their group. We felt that collaboration would be a great way to compare these two assessment methods and populations, as well as gain new ideas.
GEORGIAN COURT UNIVERSITY
Georgian Court University is a private, Catholic-faith based university in Lakewood New Jersey. Students who transfer into Georgian Court University are required to take a one-credit online transfer seminar to introduce them to the institution, ease their transfer shock and provide them with key skills to graduate. One of the major lessons is on information literacy using Georgian Court’s online Searchpath six module tutorial and quizzes. A sample of transfer student quiz results against the general undergraduate population for the 2011-2012 school year was conducted for the poster session. A further, in depth study was established and ran during the 2012-2013 school year to evaluate this special population, especially when the transfer student population increased ten percent in one year.
The goals of the study were to evaluate what the information literacy level of transfer students were when they came to Georgian Court. Methods for the study required all instructors for the course to participate in obtaining and providing answers to pre-tutorial discussion question and tutorial quiz results. A pre-tutorial discussion question, asking students to describe their library research habits, was introduced in the lesson prior to the formal information literacy lesson.
Students’ description of research materials, what institutions they transferred from, and additional comments regarding libraries were evaluated to see how students convey their academic research. Seventy-three percent of transfer students came from community colleges, twenty-three percent from universities and five percent were a mix of two. Their information literacy levels ranged from nineteen percent had no clear knowledge, thirty-two percent had some and forty-two percent were fairly versed in proper scholarly research.
Transfer students then reviewed the Searchpath information literacy tutorial and took the module quizzes. Both the poster sample and full study showed that transfer students, regardless of their previous institution or information literacy knowledge or instruction, have higher level than overall undergraduates. In general, the quiz results show across the board that all undergraduates struggle in the areas of search topic terminology, scholarly material recognition, over dependence on unreliable internet sources and limited knowledge of database variety.
FELICIAN COLLEGE
Like Georgian Court University, Felician College is also a small, private, Catholic institution. First Year Experience (FYE) is a one-credit course instructed by the general faculty at Felician College. All first year students must take FYE, and all FYE classes have one mandatory information literacy class taught by Felician College library faculty. The class is a one-shot information literacy session that runs the length of a full class (75 minutes). Most first years will take FYE both in the fall and spring; however, certain majors (i.e. nursing) are exempt from a spring class. The assessment was for the
Spring 2012 and Spring 2013 classes. Topics covered included the differences between popular and scholarly articles, how to create a search string, and how to find an article in the databases. About 1-3 weeks (the ideal date was 1, but due to scheduling issues itwasn’t always possible) after the class the students were given a brief, 5 minute post-test for retention. From our results, the Felician College library faculty were able to see areas that needed more concentration for future sessions as well as how well the students were retaining the material.
CONCLUSION
We came together to discuss assessment for these individual populations, noting that both of us had the similar background with our respective institutions. Through both of our presentations we were able to assess our individual populations and evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and how to best help them in the future. We were thrilled to present
at NJLA about this relevant topic.
Jaimie Donnelly is Technical Services and Social Sciences Librarian at Georgian Court University and Cara Berg is Information Literacy Librarian at Felician College.