Plan, Assess, Repeat! Cultivating a Culture of Assessment

Instruction librarians understand the importance of assessing student learning.  We read articles and books, attend workshops, and experiment in the classroom. We plan assessments, collect data, and if we're lucky, we review findings and reflect.  Just as we seem to be moving towards closing the loop, we suddenly find ourselves bamboozled by real challenges or imagined fears. What if we discover students haven't learned? How do we use the data to demonstrate the library's impact? How do we convince colleagues and campus partners to join in? Do we even have any idea what we are doing? Through the telling of their assessment story, the presenters will share how they figured out what they were doing along the way and provide practical advice for overcoming the uncertainties that come with assessment in the academic library. Attendees will learn about a library's prior assessment efforts, problems and solutions they encountered in building a culture of assessment, examples of assessments used in and out of the classroom, and how all of this has contributed to a more robust assessment program that effectively communicates the value of the work librarians and staff are doing.