Last week I was fortunate to get to attend and present at LOEX 2017, in Lexington, KY. I’m excited to have joined the LOEX Board of Trustees this year and it was great to see familiar faces and meet new, energized librarians, too.
I presented a one-hour workshop where I walked participants through a comparison of two common types of results reports from large-scale assessments. We looked at an example of a rubric-based assessment report and a report from the Evaluating Process and Authority module of the Threshold Achievement Test. We compared them on the criteria of timeliness, specificity, and actionability, and found that rubric results reports from large-scale assessments often lack the specificity that makes it possible to use assessment results to make plans for instructional improvement. The TATIL results report, on the other hand, offered many ways to identify areas for improvement and to inform conversations about next steps. Several librarians from institutions that are committed to using rubrics for large-scale assessment said at the end of the session that the decision between rubrics and tests now seemed more complicated than it had before. Another librarian commented that rubrics seem like a good fit for assessing outcomes in a course, but perhaps are less useful for assessing outcomes across a program or a whole institution. It was a rich conversation that also highlighted some confusing elements in the TATIL results report that we are looking forward to addressing in the next revision.
Overall, I came away from LOEX feeling excited about the future of instruction in the IL Framework era. While the Framework remains an enigma for some of us, presenters at LOEX this year found many ways to make practical, useful connections between their work and the five frames. ...continue reading "May Update: Report from LOEX"