tag: Assessment
Blog Post
January 21, 2016
Love and Measurement: Online Learning in Small, Independent Colleges
Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and interim chairman of the department of medicine, University of California, San Francisco, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times on January 17 in which he argues that measurement in both the health care and education industries has failed us. He concludes by saying, “The secret of quality is love.” He worried that our efforts to measure and improve quality somehow block the altruism that motivates both doctors and teachers to do their…
Blog Post
January 14, 2016
Library Assessment: Notes from ALA Midwinter 2016
At ALA Midwinter in Boston, we attended several valuable sessions on assessment, evaluation, and data visualization. Here’s a roundup of what we heard. ARL Library Assessment Forum Kenning Arlitsch, dean of the library at Montana State University, reported on his grant project, Measuring Up: Assessing Accuracy of Reported Use and Impact of Digital Repositories. While at Marriott Library at the University of Utah, Arlitsch observed that the reported use of the digital collections at the university’s three libraries was…
Blog Post
August 3, 2015
Notes from the Northumbria Conference
Alisa Rod and I had the pleasure of attending the 11th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, a biennial meeting held this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. Many people think of the Northumbria Conference as the British complement to the ARL Library Assessment Conference held in the US. The conference venue, Our Dynamic Earth, put us in the middle of excited children exploring oceans and rainforests on the one side and a spectacular view…
Blog Post
January 29, 2015
Assessment at Pitt
What should an undergraduate chemistry major know by the time she graduates? How can one tell if she knows it? And how can chemistry instruction be improved to ensure that more students meet those expectations? Such deceptively simple questions—for chemistry and every other discipline—have become an important focus of higher education leaders, accrediting agencies, and government. Yet many universities have struggled to develop robust processes for assessing student learning. Even when a central administration makes a serious effort to develop…
Case Study
January 29, 2015
Making Assessment Work
Lessons from the University of Pittsburgh
The past two decades have seen increasing pressure for greater transparency about student learning from both within and outside higher education. Internally, there is a desire to understand and improve the efficacy of curriculum, pedagogy, and student support. Externally, there is a desire to hold institutions—particularly public institutions—accountable. As a result, in the early 2000s the major higher education accreditors began to review colleges’ processes for setting student learning outcomes, assessing those outcomes, and responding to the results.[1]…
Blog Post
August 14, 2014
Notes from the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle
The Library Assessment Conference took place last week in Seattle, a valuable forum for those gathering and using evidence in support of library management and planning. I attended, with my colleague Alisa Rod, Ithaka S+R’s surveys coordinator. The program included a diverse set of presentations on topics from information literacy to space planning. Ithaka S+R’s local surveys were also featured in a number of sessions on the program. Developing the Ithaka S+R Student Survey Alisa and Heather Gendron,…
Blog Post
August 14, 2014
The Role of Assessment in Libraries
Last week at the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle, I gave a talk on “Vision, Alignment, Impediments, Assessment.” As academic libraries face a variety of strategic issues, I argued, they need to consider how to implement evidence-based decision making processes more broadly in their institutions. There’s a significant role for the assessment community in building such processes, and as libraries continue to invest in assessment, they have the opportunity to use data to address their challenges. I reviewed some…
Blog Post
February 12, 2014
The Ithaka S+R Local Faculty Survey at SUNY Potsdam
Twenty-eight colleges and universities have signed on to administer Ithaka S+R’s Local Faculty Survey since we initiated this service, and librarians are beginning to tell us about the impact of the surveys on their campuses. We recently caught up with Jenica Rogers, Library Director at SUNY Potsdam, who is using the survey results as she drafts her library’s next strategic plan. SUNY Potsdam’s provost also plans to incorporate the data from the survey into her proposal to create a…