So I had to go look through the slides to remember what content we actually talked about in last week's class, because all I remember is looking at lots of different types of survey questions! Ha.
After pondering everything we discussed about summative and formative assessment, I'm left again with the thought that this stuff is really hard to get right. As librarians, we really want a lot of feedback on how well we're doing what we're doing from our patrons, and we really do want to use that feedback to make things better in the future. But looking at all those different types of survey questions, and debating the pros and cons of each, just sort of overwhelms me. In every situation, it seems like a different approach might work best, and when you have a lot of different stakeholders to please (your boss, the people giving you money, etc.) it makes things even more complicated.
Formative assessment is even trickier, though. As we noted in class, librarians tend to be pretty good at giving formative assessment-- offering advice about what people are doing as they're doing it and observing patrons to find areas they need additional help with. And I was really intrigued by the suggested methods for library-friendly formative assessment strategies. Many of them are strategies that I think would work really well in most educational environments, not just libraries, but are never implemented!
As usual, I kept thinking about how to apply this all to the archival world, since that's where I want to make my career. And as usual, my thoughts boil down "archivists really need to figure this stuff out." When it comes to getting feedback from users, archives are light-years behind libraries. Even getting users to offer summative assessment of their experience in archives and with archival instruction is not something that usually happens. And though archivists are often just as good as librarians at giving formative assessment, getting users to offer formative assessment almost never happens, unfortunately. Part of this has to do with the lack of formal instruction about information literacy in archival settings at all. As the articles I read two weeks ago pointed out, archives still haven't really developed a coherent framework for teaching the sort of skills needed to effectively use archives-- to actually find information and do archival research. Archival instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use primary sources, ignoring how to actually find relevant primary sources that you can use to begin with. If archives actually started teaching, on a large scales, how to utilize the multitude of resources out there for finding materials, I think we could implement these formative assessment strategies, and there would be a lot learned about how people do research, people's knowledge of archival resources, and what we need to be doing as archivists to help the situation. But there's a long way to go to get to that. I can only hope these are the sort of problems I can help fix in my career.
Tyson,
ReplyDeleteI am really interested in your post because this is now the third or fourth time that you have mentioned the lack of information literacy in archives. Do you think that archives can fix this alone or do you see libraries and archives working together to solve this.
I also imagine that since at the archive researches probably want to be left alone once they have been given their box of goodies, there is less instructional interaction between archivist and user there is very little time for assessment of any kind.
Oh, libraries and archives definitely have to work together! Part of the problem, I would say, is that even though most archives are situated within libraries, they don't really take advantage of those opportunities to collaborate like they should. Convincing archivists that they have a lot to learn from librarians-- and a lot of ways they can be directly helped by their librarian colleagues-- is maybe half the battle.
DeleteYour second point is very true as well. I was actually going to make a point just along those lines in my post, but it didn't fit in with the rest of what I was saying. I think that the functionality of how archival research happens has a lot to do with why there isn't more or better user education. It's a complicated issue-- part of it has something to do with the fact that most archives still have the majority of their materials in analog format, which requires users to physically visit them. In libraries, you never see the majority of your users, because so much information is online. So figuring out when people need help and in what ways is complicated by all this. It's a very tricky set of issues.