| Title: | Embracing the Peaks and Valleys: Using Assessment Data to Redesign a First-Year Experience Library Session |
| Authors: | Demeter, Michelle Kehoe, Lauren McCartin, Marybeth |
| Keywords: | library, libraries, first year program, ACRL, information literacy, NYU Libraries |
| Issue Date: | 13-Apr-2021 |
| Citation: | “Embracing the Peaks and Valleys: Using Assessment Data to Redesign a First-Year Experience Library Session.” Presentation Michelle Demeter, Lauren Kehoe, & Marybeth McCartin Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference, April 2021. |
| Abstract: | Our institution’s College of Arts and Sciences offers an long-standing non-credit bearing course to all incoming first-year students that includes a visit to the library. This is a massive undertaking with about 1,500 students passing through the library in 50 classes spread over a brief two and a half weeks. This presentation will feature the three librarians involved in the redesign of the 2019 class and planning toward the 2020 fall term. Aspects of the redesign include the collection and use of assessment data, considerations of accessibility and scalability, and how an established partnership was approached with fresh ideas. |
| Description: | Many universities offer a first-year experience course that helps new students become oriented to the academic, social, and experiential life of college. Our institution does not use the term “first-year experience,” but our College of Arts and Sciences offers an equivalent non-credit bearing course to all incoming first-year students, called the College Cohort Program, aka “Cohorts.” During Cohorts, students visit departments across campus to acclimate them to university life and explore places throughout their new academic hometown. In the middle of the semester, all students visit the library for a tour and an introduction to research services and support. Because this is an introductory course with no writing assignment, the library provides a “snapshot” of the many ways students can get research or reference assistance, how to find books and a wide range of technology, how to reserve study rooms, and a number of other services. This is a massive undertaking with about 1,500 students passing through the library in 50 classes spread over just two and a half weeks. Due to this unique format, the instruction librarians meet with the course coordinators every summer to refine and update the program. In 2019, the instruction librarians reviewed anecdotal and coursewide survey evidence provided by the course coordinators and identified numerous areas for improvement, resulting in a massive redesign of the library component. In 2020, with the shadow of the coronavirus looming over fall term, the team regrouped to consider new alternatives for a remote instruction session that also included a significant shift to include a lesson that incorporated EDI in a way never attempted in this course before. This poster will feature the three librarians involved in the redesign of the 2019 class and planning toward the 2020 fall term. They will discuss how they approached an established partnership with fresh ideas using data collected from 2018. This data collection led to the development of an additional assessment survey given to students immediately following the library component of the course, as well as a separate survey of the librarians recruited from around the libraries to lead the session who gave their feedback. In addition to data collection, the poster presenters will address how they designed the class and opened it to colleagues for their feedback and additional ideas for a wider collective of improvement. The poster presenters will describe how they incorporated the campus common read to establish an inclusive lesson plan that would allow all students to participate in discussions. In an effort to balance internal service equity, the librarians will describe how they designed training and scripts to ensure that anyone in the library could actively and confidently participate as instructors, which was necessary for scalability. Finally, the speakers will address how they prioritized accessibility needs while designing the tour and share lessons learned for the next iteration’s planning. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/63807 |
| Rights: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. |
| Appears in Collections: | Lauren Kehoe's Collection |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACRL Poster FINAL a11y.pptx | ACRL 2021 poster presentation accessible PowerPoint. | 10.48 MB | Microsoft Powerpoint XML | View/Open |
| Embracing the Peaks and Valleys--Using Assessment Data to Redesign a First Year Experience Library Session_Poster.mp4 | ACRL 2021 poster presentation video. | 9.38 MB | MPEG-4 | View/Open |
| Embracing the Peaks and Valleys_Poster.pdf | ACRL 2021 poster presentation accessible PDF. | 17.96 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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