UT Libraries

It‘s the nature of our work: librarians typically come into one-shot instruction sessions without the benefit of knowing much about the students they‘ll be teaching and by the time the session is over and they have learned something about them, they may never see those particular students again. Developing valid rules of thumb, then, becomes precious. If a class full of freshman is more likely to engage with a certain pedagogy or resource, knowing so based on past experience would give librarians an advantage as they plan their lessons and engage with students in-session. In the spring of 2010, the English librarian and the science librarian at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) began a project to identify such trends across classrooms by creating a common student evaluation form. We hoped using the form would generate a dataset that could inform our sessions with evidence-based pedagogical approaches and contribute to instruction planning dialogs with classroom faculty (Ariew & Lener, 2007).