1. Library Instruction Assessment of First Year Undergraduates at a Small College Library Patricia M. Duck Evan Cornell University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg September 28, 2004

2. Who We Are Small regional campus library Part of the University of Pittsburgh Library System About 1900 undergraduate students –70% commuter, 30% resident 20 majors

3. Why we did an outcomes assessment study Previous history of assessment Campus evaluation efforts Response to a new environment How (or if) library users change as a result of their contact with the library and its instructional program

4. How we did it Picked a study group: Freshman Seminar –181 “captive” students Developed pre and posttest based on the Daniel Library at The Citadel (see Hernon’s An Action Plan for Outcomes Assessment) Involved psych dept., seminar faculty and senior capstone students

5. Pretest and Posttest: 12 questions “Action” questions: –find a book in the library –find a journal article in the digital library “Instructional” questions: – did you receive instruction; how many times? “Opinion” questions: –do you agree?

6. Sample Pretest Form

7. Two instructional sessions Overview of the library Introduction to local reference books and LC system How to search Pittcat (library catalog) Discussion of the “right” vocabulary Comparison of results searching databases in the Digital Library vs Internet Evaluation of internet resources

8. Pittcat Screen s=gambling

9. Pitt Digital Library Screen

10. Crunching the numbers Manual tabulation Access database Report delivered to psych students Data input and run through SPSS Only 71 (out of 181) were usable

11. Question 1: Find a book

12. Question 2: Find an article

13. Questions 3-9: Results in Percentages

14. Question 10: Everything is on the Web

15. Question 11: Examine credentials

16. Question 12: Document information

17. Statistical Results for Question 1 & 2

18. Problems Encountered Explaining the pretest and posttest Completing the pretest and posttest Plagiarism Coding of surveys Lack of time for focus groups

19. The Next Step Re-do the survey with specific instructions Revise coding Have focus groups Library Experiences at UPG

20. Thank you for your attention! Dr. Pat Duck Millstein Library University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg 1150 Mt Pleasant Rd. Greensburg PA 15601 724- 836- 9689 pmd1@pitt.edu