Assessment – My Journey

I became a Research and Instruction librarian in 2015. I had done my MLIS right before, and I distinctly remember in one of the classes, discussing pre and post instructional assessments that librarians gave out. We designed one, for a fake class lesson. THEN we had to give the pre, give a presentation, and give a post test, then we had to assess our classmates' attempts.  When I took over for a retiring librarian, he handed me his files for pre and post tests.

And after all of that, in four years of being a librarian, teaching... one hundred or so one-off classes, I have never given a single pre or post assessment. You saw that coming, didn't you?

I hate them. I can't imagine anything worse as a student than to answer 5 questions, then listen to a librarian talk about databases for an hour, then answer the same or a variation of the same 5 questions. And I'm the librarian. I hate it for them.

But I'm running out of excuses. There are so many ways to engage students now, and so many tools by which to gauge their abilities, interests or ability to stay awake now, it's harder to come up with an excuse other than "I just don't want to."

This summer I had to develop a series of tools for online instruction. These tools were a huge learning experience for me, and finally shifted my thinking on a number of processes that I had implemented in the first four years of my career. Talking with other librarians who had been around the block, they all looked at me like "of course..." and I recognize that my own stubbornness and "wanting to fight the status quo" had made me late to the party, yet again.

So, to end: assessment is important. It's crucial to gauging where a student is and what they are capable of, and is a key to an instructor providing information at a level that can and will be absorbed, used, and built upon. I need to quit fighting it, and accept it. Besides, 5 questions isn't all that much.