Assessment fun with clickers; and mobile phone clickers too

And welcome back from the hiatus--I don't know where the semester went! Please forgive the retro-post, getting back into the saddle and finishing up some of the posts I started and didn't quite publish!

We are continuing to focus on our assessment efforts. We have our big assessment project involving first year English composition students. We crunched the numbers with that and also going forward with revising our tests again. I will save that for a later post, but we did do our first pilot assessment using our Senteo/Synchroneyes clicker software and equipment as part of our continuing efforts to extend assessment into other classes. We are targeting next our Freshman Seminar classes.

I am looking forward to trying this out. I did not personally do the pilot clicker assessment but my colleague indicated that he felt it went very well. It was a simple post-test consisting of three questions, given at the end of the instruction session. I can say that I handled the statistics for the class. Synchroneyes/Senteo has a very decent system for results--they come out in a neat graph with basic statistics like class average and percentage answering correctly in an Excel file.

The only drawback is that the statistics do not appear to be cumulative, and so to extend this to all our other Freshman Seminar classes we'd have to evolve a system to name each Excel file with the name of the librarian, class, and possibly date or time, and then save in a shared folder. And then later if I wanted to add up the statistics for all the students taking that post-test, I would have to combine the Excel files....

If anyone out there has used Synchroneyes/Senteo and has a better approach, please please do let me know!

Another intriguing development is the use of web-based software so mobile phones/smartphones can be used as clickers. (an example would be Polleverywhere) I did a very desultuory search on Google and there were a few links. One of the things that came to mind immediately as a possible use for this technology would be our massively large Freshman Orientation sessions.

The fall orientations usually last 3 days, working about 3000 students in batches throughout the day. We generally show them several videos, and the last few years we have given them a paper "quiz" which we collect at the end of the session. It's quite rough to tabulate so many "quizzes" and so it seems having the students vote on the answers to various simple questions tied to the outcomes for this orientation, with a chart displayed on the big screen of the teaching theater where the orientation sessions happen would bring a welcome sense of interactivity to the library portion.

I am not quite sure given the scale of this orientation, that it might work well, but it's definitely an interesting idea..........:) and one I hope might come to pass eventually.

Back from Hiatus

And I am terribly sorry for the delay. It's been a bit of an interesting summer. I went to Hungary and the Czech Republic for vacation most of July, and then it was pretty much straight to Denver at the beginning of August for the Reference Renaissance conference. (I think i will save some of the presentations and our presentation for a later post).

Assessment

But there are lots of interesting and cool things to catch up on. Over the summer, we continued to work on our Assessment efforts for our second-semester Freshman English course. Since we only had two classes it gave us a chance to test the Synchroneyes quiz/test tool a little more comfortably. In the contest of Synchroneyes vs. Survey Monkey, my admittedly non-scientific preference at this time is for Survey Monkey, only because when I used Synchroneyes I had to print out every single survey.

I wasn't able to make it to the LOEX of the West conference, but my colleagues did, and they told me about a great presentation from University of Texas Libraries(which is about 30 minutes away up I-35) called "Assessing out Assessment: Failures and Successes at UT-Austin." I think it is proving to be helpful for understanding and planning our assessment effort, and I wanted to give a shout-out to AJ Johnson, who let me ask questions about their presentation/project and generally let me pick his brain.

And, along other lines, we are going to experiment with using "clickers" to do assessment. We have used them in some of our classes as part of our active learning activities. With that in mind I have been reading this article: Clicking your way to library instruction assessment.

Embedding Librarians in TRACS (SAKAI)

I know this is already something that has been happening in other places, but this semester we are going to make an effort to "embed" ourselves in the course software. We have done some things in the past, with a few classes, mostly building wiki pages using the course management software wiki function (as distinct from our wiki) But we'd like to try more classes and do more, like embed a meebo widget in the class site. So stay tuned for that.

I think I will stop for now. :)