Week 14: Assessment and Evidence

Final post! Whew!

Fittingly, our final set of readings is focused on assessing how effective the school library actually is. Once you've put in all the energy and time managing, collaborating, creating access, instructing, etc., you need to understand the outcome. How to do this? Well, Young suggests librarians collect data in three main categories: access (hours open, staffing, remote access to online resources); suitability (how well the library program meets curriculum needs); and competency (just how knowledgeable is library staff??). This article also gives an overview of the different entities that collect data on libraries/academic performance, at the state-level, etc.

Young asks "Are students finding adequate and sufficient resources to complete assignments without having to go to the public library?" While I understand that the school library should contain enough material that students can do their homework, is a trip to the local library such a bad thing? Why duplicate resources? Seems like a good area for collaboration. 

The Todd article discusses why assessment is meaningful and how it is approached in different contexts around the world. The most interesting part of the article was finding out a bit on global perspectives on school librarianship--how it is researched, understood, and valued by different countries.
 
Mueller writes "If a goal is worth pursuing, it is worth measuring." I guess school library skills are worth pursuing, because he goes on to discuss some ways of measuring students' grasp on them. In particular, this article is focused on the idea of "authentic assessment"--doing "real world" work to demonstrate competency of some skill or knowledge area. As such, it's tricky to get a good idea of how well students understand what they have learned. There are often multiple "right answers," and no sure way to assess comprehension of a standard. When thinking about the various standards we have examined, I wonder how it would ever be possible for these to be accurately tested, since so many of them could be interpreted in so many ways...
Like always, the reading from Woolls this week is eminently practical, listing strategies for assessing all aspects of the library program, including the collection, staff, and student learning. She discusses quantitative versus qualitative assessment as well. I am still not convinced that using numbers is the best way to prove a library's worth. Without (a lot of) context, most numerical figures (e.g. 10,000 books) are meaningless? How many students are in the school? How many classrooms have their own libraries? Is it a low-income area where students don't have access to reading material at home? etc. I did appreciate one quote in the reading, actually taken from Francis Henne, "Learning to Learn in School Libraries":

"For some students...the only library skill that they should have to acquire is an awareness, imprinted indelibly and happily upon them, that the library is a friendly place where the librarians are eager to help." I think encouraging this idea among students is crucial, as it provides access to information literacy skills not just in the immediate future, but in later areas of life as well (college and beyond) where other types of libraries (academic, public, etc.) can be utilized.


While I appreciate the time and energy that is invested in keeping track of the effectiveness of school library programs across the country, I wonder still about the impact of this data collection. Librarians are still losing their jobs, petitions exist to stand up for library programs, and libraries still need advocates, despite the data in their favor. Ultimately, I think the personal relationships and the individuals who use the library resources will provide the most accurate assessment of its value.