Present: Peter Cohn (minutes), Lisa Horowitz, Angie Locknar, Anita Perkins, Lisa Sweeney, Mark Szarko
Announcements:
- Angie showed us a pamphlet she had received that is supposed to help teach students critical thinking skills. Ask her if you'd like ordering info.
- Nina Davis-Millis and Sands Fish will be coming to RISG to talk about how they might be able to help us with keeping instruction statistics. (Note: they are coming to our March 21st meeting.) As we start talking more about this and other ways to collect reference statistics we should think about what we want to learn from our statistics and ascertain what we need to be collecting for ARL.
- The Tutorials Task force is turning in their report to Steve and Nina this week.
- Angie's work with 3.091 has received a 2nd year of funding from the d'Arbeloff fund for excellence in education. The funding will be used to hire a post-doc TA to change course assignments and integrate the online work from the fall into the class. The hope is that once this works with
- 3.091 similar work can be done in other freshman chemistry classes.
- Mark asked if anyone on the committee is checking out laptops to use for instruction. Nobody else on the committee is doing this.
- We were asked to let the DIRC Committee know when we are trying to schedule a class in the DIRC and find that the timeslot is already taken. This will the DIRC Committee better understand when and by who the DIRC is being used.
Assessment:
We spent the meeting discussing our assessment project. Peter updated the committee on the last PSLG meeting's assessment discussion. As a result of that discussion RISG talked about narrowing our project for the year. After some discussion RISG decided to focus our assessment efforts on awareness of our subject pages (including the publication types pages that are also listed on the subject pages.) This makes sense because we put a lot of effort into these pages and when users are aware of them they find them very helpful. Getting an idea of awareness of the pages will provide us with some findings that we can really act on.
We will look at:
- Student awareness of subject pages. We'll break this out by student status (Grad/Undergrad) and by department.
- Faculty awareness of subject pages. (The rationale being that if we can make them more aware they will promote these to their students.) Library desk staff awareness of subject pages
Our hope is to get a baseline % of awareness broken out by the groups mentioned above.
Assessment tools:
- 2005 User survey. We should be able to get awareness percentages broken down in all of the ways we need like the data on staff assistance that Alex Caracuzzo sent to Peter.) Anita will check with Alex and on turnpike to see if there is already data analyzed for awareness of subject pages and pull together any other survey data that will help us.
- Hits on subject pages. We'll look at page hits and compare them with the number of page hits to some high use page--specifically hits on the Ask Us! page and the Help Yourself page. We discussed how many months of data to examine. Lisa Sweeney will see how difficult it is to get these numbers. If it isn't too difficult she will get the hits for every month from Oct. 2005 to the present. If that proves to be too difficult she'll pull numbers for Oct, Nov., Mar., Apr., Jan., and July of 2005 2006 and part of 2007.
- Anecdotal Evidence -- Alan will send a message to subject specialists asking for anecdotal evidence of awareness or lack of awareness of subject pages. (Message being drafted).
- There may be a way to see who is linking to our subject pages (within MIT). Peter will investigate with help from Angie.
- User needs assessment -- Look at what is there that may indicate awareness or lack of awareness of subject pages.
For Service Desk awareness. --Lisa Horowitz will look at the staff surveys that were done related to the core competencies to see if there is information we can glean.
We will discuss this data at our May meeting on May 16.