Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Examination Of The Properties, Uses And Interpretations Of First Grade Reading Screening Tools In One School District, Amadee Meyer

Doctoral Dissertations

Early identification of children who are likely to struggle to achieve reading proficiency is essential to providing them timely access to effective interventions. Thus, universal screening is a critical feature of preventative service delivery models that identify students at risk and provide early support for reading difficulties. As schools choose assessment tools for this purpose, three aspects of universal screening tools are especially important to consider: appropriateness for the intended use, technical adequacy, and usability. Using these standards for assessment review, this study investigated two screening tools commonly used to identify first-graders at risk for reading failure: the Aimsweb Tests …

If At First You Don't Succeed In Your Instruction Methodology, Try, Try Again, Katelyn Angell, Eric Shannon

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Teaching, by its very nature, is a trial and error process. Experimenting with a variety of methods of pedagogies is an integral part of determining which strategies demonstrate the greatest possible learning outcomes. One would be hard-pressed to meet an academic instruction librarian without at least one concrete example of a teaching method or educational activity that was not a success within the library instruction classroom. However, these incidents are critical learning experiences that inspire instruction librarians to grow and develop their teaching practice, hopefully in tandem with student feedback, opportunities for assessment, and the support of departmental colleagues.

The …

When Your Info Café Fails, Think Of Your Lms As Take-Out: Learning From The Services Students Won’T Use To Create The Services They Will, Elizabeth Chase, Patricia Mcpherson, Heather Perry

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

In 2012 we transformed our obsolete periodicals desk into The Info Cafe, and planned a series of information skills workshops for that meeting space. In an effort to encourage attendance at those drop-in sessions, we partnered with the our institution’s merit point program to offer points to each student who attended a twenty-minute workshop on topics ranging from searching a specific database to using a particular citation style. The merit point system, which was discontinued in 2015, provided a range of opportunities for students to amass points that contributed to their odds of getting their preferred choice in the institution's …

Reframing Failure: Post Mortems For Library Projects, Danielle S. Apfelbaum, Derek Stadler

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As librarians, we often take part in or lead projects and initiatives, but not all of these endeavors succeed; we sometimes experience failure. Whether a solo research effort or a collaborative attempt to improve information literacy skills, not every endeavor may go as planned. Yet, how often do we take a step back and investigate how, what, when, where, and with whom a critical breakdown occurred? The post mortem -- a systematic method for discovering, documenting, and disseminating an actionable summary of the ups and downs of a project’s execution -- offers librarians a valuable tool for reframing failure as …

These Are Not Your Students: How Service Orientation Doomed A Library Instruction Assessment Project And What It Took To Bring It Back To Life, Kathrine C. Aydelott

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

I was new to campus, a faculty member in the library in charge of overseeing our instruction program, and--in pursuit of building my tenure portfolio--I had partnered with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to develop a terrific research project: in order to assess whether our first-year composition students retained their one-shot library orientation instruction, I designed an online Blackboard module to be delivered in “flipped classroom” style. Some classes would see a librarian in class for the traditional lecture-style session, as had been the case for years, while some would complete the module, a series of four …

Fake News: Taking News Evaluation Out Of The Classroom And Into The Fire, Martha Kruy, Briana Mcguckin, Theodora Ruhs, Susan Slaga-Metivier

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As cries of “fake news” weave into popular discourse, university reference and instruction librarians have teamed up with a Journalism professor to lead a workshop tackling a two-pronged issue: defining what fake news is (and isn’t), and evaluating news from several commonly-encountered source types (from videos and memes to more traditional-looking articles online). The goal of this workshop was to spread information and news literacies in a time when they are sorely needed. While this venture began as a campus event, all presenters involved agreed that the tools and resources provided would be especially valuable to communities beyond the classroom. …

Survey Says: Strategies For Responding To Challenging Findings, Erica Schattle, Dorothy Meaney

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As academic libraries are increasingly called on to demonstrate their value, librarians are beginning to define measures of library impact that work both within and across libraries and constituents. Initiatives such as ACRL's Assessment in Action program have sought to quantify library impact on student success through action research and campus collaboration. But what happens when data collected through an action research project tells you something you don't want to learn? This session will share one university library's experiences with shifting focus from measuring user satisfaction to assessing library impact through a biennial survey of students and faculty. Librarians collaborated …