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Pursuant to the system wide instruction plan, the instruction assessment group (Angie, Lisa Horowitz, Mark) reported on their work on developing a pilot plan to assess student learning. They have reviewed a number of standards and tools related to undergraduate information literacy, and from these, identified several tools to assess short and long term learning outcomes for undergraduates at MIT. The proposed outcomes focus on students' ability to select appropriate resources according to their information need. Vehicles for implementing the tools were discussed, and more needs to be learned about taking advantage of the MIT Student SurveySenior Survey, as well as other surveys done of undergrads as well as grad students.
Wording of the tools was discussed and there were additional suggestions for outcomes that are important for undergraduate literacy. It was agreed that basic data concepts and quantitative information should be considered for assessment in some way. Maggie will share the proposed standards with Kate McNeill and seek her input on assessment of data-related information.
It was agreed that the group should continue to refine the tools and develop a plan for implementation. Discussion of assessment for graduate students and whether to continue the survey of students' assessment of instruction relevance, currently in pilot stage, was deferred to another meeting.
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Remlee presented recommendations on formatting and style that the LibGuides task force (Remlee, Angie, Peter, Georgiana, Maggie) has developed for LibGuides pages. Because it is user-friendly, LibGuides, a content management system, can be used by subject specialists to create course pages, subject guides, etc. LibGuides will also be used to present listings of databases and their descriptions by subject. Training for subject specialists and web contacts has been scheduled for July.
Lisa H. raised a question from UIG about only creating research guides from subject guides and publication types, excluding course pages and database cheatsheets as different types of guides. Overall, RISG members seemed to feel that all the guides should be combined into research guides, possibly creating a "subject" called courses. This is because students do not differentiate amongst these guides. Angie commented that perhaps cheatsheets could be significantly reduced or even eliminated.
The group discussed issues related to the merging of the content of subject guides and publication type guides with the database listings to create "hybrid" research guides. UIG and RISG will have more discussions about how to develop the new research guides and associated navigation paths once Nicole and Marion have created some mock-ups.
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