Assessment Aha! Moment #4: I don't care about your data

Aha Moment #4: I don’t care about your data—I care about the conversations that came out from the data.

                One of the euphemisms I heard time and again at this conference was “and then we used the research data to have conversations about XYZ.” You have probably experienced that each session at every library conference held anytime, everywhere starts with a slide about how their library and their students are special snowflakes. If we truly buy into that belief that our students are all so different, that means we each need to complete the exact same studies at each of our institutions to prove the same thing time and again—that academic libraries have value. On the other hand, we instinctively know the answer to this question to be true already. What I am getting at is that the discrete data points that were presented at this conference were not what were interesting to me. Instead, I wanted to hear briefly about the research method, where I could find a longer description of the whole thing, and how I might replicate it. But most importantly, instead of stopping there, I also wanted to hear more about the conversations that were had because of the study. So many times, right after I heard this euphemism of “having conversations,” I wanted to beg for more details. After attending this conference, I now have a list of colleagues I need to reach out to in order to ask for more information. Some neat studies included using rubrics to assess students’ ePortfolios at a small liberal arts school, and a larger school that had students compose at 140-character tweet at the end of their library session. They then coded each of the tweets to look for patterns.