ADDIE Week 5: Evaluation

This is the last post in a series. If you did not read the other posts in the series, start here.

The E in ADDIE stands for Evaluation, which I will also use interchangeably with assessment in this post.

I have an admission to make. I may be the ideas queen, but I am not yet the assessment queen. The fact of the matter is, traditional methods of assessment is tough in the library setting. In a one-shot class, they are not your students. The librarian does not give out grades; in fact, we only see them for 50 minutes once, maybe twice. If you embed a three-minute library tutorial at the point of need, why would a student take the time to give feedback unless they had very strong feelings about it? That being said, there are many steps in the ADDIE process where you can do assessment of yourself. Perhaps the best place to start is to describe a couple of kinds of assessment.

Formative assessment allows students and their instructors to check in and monitor their understanding. An example of a formative assessment would be a research proposal, a PollEverywhere survey, or a quick verbal check of understanding of main points during a class. This allows the instructor to come back and reteach the topic another way, if necessary.

Courtesy of Hey Girl blog

Summative assessment allows an instructor to see how much a student learned. The most common example of a summative assessment is a midterm or final exam.

Formative assessment is the type of assessment that I feel best fits library instruction. As I mentioned before, we are not the ones giving the grades (thankfully!). Quick spot checks are the best way to figure out if students are learning what they need to know. Some examples of old-school library formative assessment is the 3-2-1 Assessment, the minute paper, or the muddiest point exercise.

The issue here is that formative assessment is hugely important--but it does not unequivocally show student success, the kind of thing where you can equate how well someone learned something. This has become what I call "the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg" for the library. If the library could find a way to prove their impact on each student, this would mean we could fight things like budget cuts and get new positions more readily. Formative assessment is also not the type of thing that you want to use to assess whether someone is a good teacher or not. My feeling is that it is mainly an ethereal kind of assessment--temporary and made to incite change in the student or instructor.

Another form that assessment takes is self-assessment during the ADDIE process. Some examples of this are to check back to make sure that the lesson or tutorial that you are designing teaches the learning objectives you hope the students will master. You may wish to do a usability test to try out the website, tutorial, or instruction on a learner or two and see if they understand the learning objectives after having gone through the instructional intervention.

I am excited to learn more about assessment and I have made this an area of growth for myself personally and for our department. To do my part, I am going to the ARL Assessment Conference in October. The past proceedings are published up until 2014 and these are a treasure trove of ideas that I have yet to dive into. I also worked to reorganize our department to make room for a Coordinator of Instructional Assessment, who just started in March. Through these methods, I hope to become an assessment guru!

This was the last blog post in the ADDIE series. If you have questions or comments, or wish to know more about a specific part of the process, please let me know!