Survey Considerations

While thinking about creating a survey to find out what activities, if any, within a library instruction session students and professors find most helpful, I had a couple thoughts:

• First, it might be interesting to have a separate questionnaire for the students' instructors.  Getting their opinion of what the students preferred about the session and about what they think was most helpful for the students could be useful.
• Also, if surveying instructors/professors of college/university classes that come in for instruction, might it be useful to have a separate survey distributed to them towards the end of the semester?  This would give instructors more time to see how their students responded and used what they learned in the instruction session.
• For students, surveys can be distributed at the end of the library orientation and collected when the students are leaving.
• To maximize response (have more students complete the survey), it must be clear and concise (or short and sweet).  
• Should the survey be based online?  Or paper form?  Or could the same survey be distributed both ways, depending on whether their library instruction is taking place in a room with or without computers?

More thoughts to ponder...

The Ideas...

This will almost definitely not be the most organized post you have ever seen.  However, I've had a lot of random thoughts about the directions my proposal could take, and I want to get them down before I forget.

• A fixed (or quantitative) design does not seem very appropriate for my intended topic.  The only way I think I could incorporate that sort of methodology would be to see whether library instruction has an impact on students' grades.  While that idea is certainly interesting, I'm not sure I want to go there.  Based on the little bit of literature I have reviewed, I believe others may have already conducted a similar study.  Also this would not incorporate the focus on activities that I was aiming for.
• If I really did want to make my research multi-strategy, it would be interesting to compare students' grades from library sessions without activities to sessions with activities.  I will have to consider this further.
• All that being said, I really think that at least half of my proposal is going to call for a flexible approach, and if I want to gauge students' opinions of activities during library instruction, a survey is probably the best way to obtain that information.  I know that the librarians in TCL already have students fill out short surveys at the end of their instruction (if there is enough time).  However, to see what students think about activities would require a separate/new survey.
• Found some potentially relevant articles in EBSCOhost (all the Library* databases and Academic Search Complete).  Some good subject terms are "library orientation," "active learning," and "information literacy."  Will have to look further into those articles.

I think that is all for now, though I feel like I am forgetting some of the things I meant to include.  I suppose when/if I remember, I will edit this post.  Goodbye for now!

Narrowing...

The title of this post may be a little deceptive in that I am still not prepared to narrow much.  However, after watching a library instruction session at my library I find myself quite interested in the use and choice of activities in the session.  The first activity involved each student being given a slip of paper with a question on it, to be read (or asked) aloud when the librarian instructor was ready.  In the second activity students were numbered off, put into groups, and given a couple minutes to describe a picture (or, if you'll allow, to come up with keywords).  These two activities occurred towards the beginning of the session.  Though participation was certainly encouraged throughout, I do not remember any activities in the middle of the class.  At the end was a third activity, something like Jeopardy, that was meant to help students remember everything they learned during the session.

My initial questions are these:
Do students find these activities enjoyable (at least, more enjoyable than simply sitting through instruction)?
Do these activities actually help students remember what they learned during the session?

I know I still have a very long way to go.  But this is what I have so far.

Where to begin?

Hello and welcome!  

This is my research blog for SLIS J705.  In it I hope to record some of the thought processes and work that go into creating a research proposal.

Where I'm at now:

So far I have no very specific idea of what to research.  I am most interested in (and most familiar with) academic libraries, reference services, and library instruction, so that is likely to be the direction I will take.  I will post again once I receive a little more focused inspiration.