Mann Instruction Toolkit: Assessing Student Learning

This document in Box provides a list of pre-assessment questions that can be used in a Qualtrics survey and sent to students prior to the instruction session in order to gauge their experience and interests.

Question Bank A from 2018 Undergraduate IL Survey
Questions can be pulled from this bank for pre- and post-assessment. Questions are more skill-focused.

Question Bank B from 2018 Undergraduate IL Survey
Questions can be pulled from this document for pre- and post-assessment. Questions are more skill-focused.

In general, assessment can be divided into two major categories, formative and summative assessments.  

Formative assessment - Conducted before or during an instruction session.  The intent can vary significantly.  It may be conducted to see what students know about a topic, or to determine what to discuss in class.  It may also be conducted as a method to get students to critically think about a topic or to engage students with the content.   

Summative assessment - Usually conducted at the end of a session or a unit.  The intent is typically to determine the quality of instruction, what was learned, and how much was learned.  Student grades are usually very dependent on performance on summative assessments.  Research papers and exams are the most common examples of summative assessments.  

As librarians, when we work with one-shot sessions, it is somewhat unusual to be involved in the grading for final papers or exams.  As a result, we often have to conduct our own, lower-stakes summative assessments to determine what students have learned during the class.

Anything from a classroom poll to informal Q&A to in-class hands-on exercises would be an example of a formative assessment.

Please note: in full semester-long classes, 3-2-1 and the One-minute paper would be considered formative assessments rather than summative (since they are low-stakes and would guide instruction for the same group of students in the future).  

There are quite literally hundreds of tools that allow you to conduct formative assessments using technology in the classroom.  These are some of the most popular tools.