Project-MLA tutorial for SUNY Morrisville State College

In IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing and Assessment, we are required to do a term-long project with a library. Working with librarian at Morrisville State College, our project is to create an MLA tutorial to improve students' understanding of academic integrity and avoid plagiarism with ability to use citation properly.

We are not creating the actual tutorial for the library, instead, our assignment include literature review and creating project plan, marketing plan and assessment plan for the tutorial project.

Some reflections:

Project plan

When I first saw the project, I though it was much easier for us to complete the project than "planning" it and we all believed that creating an MLA tutorial could be done within one or two days. While reviewing literature, we found several researches demonstrating positive outcomes of offering citation tutorial to undergraduate students and the importance of assessing the project is addressed. It is easy to "jump in and do it", however, without planning, it will be impossible to know if the goal is achieved or not.

The instructional services librarian is the one who is responsible for the whole project, but he/she is not the one who best understands the difficulties that students have with proper citation and plagiarism. Thus, the success of the project relies much on communication with English department faculty and writing group and their input to the project.

Marketing plan

I’m also taking IST 649 (Human Interaction with Computers) this semester and one of the assignment is a web usability evaluation. We are required to design two tasks to search for specific information on the website and recruit three participants to complete the task. One of my tasks for participants is to find APA citation guidance on SU library website. In the survey, all the participants agree that it is essential for a library website to host citation guidance information, however, only two participants know there is such information on the website. According to my study, the web usability is not satisfying to help students find such information easily. In other words, SU library is not doing well in “marketing” citation guide to students.

A well-designed MLA tutorial or any other programs that a library is promoting would be useless if no one knows its existence. Marketing strategy is essential for the library to let their project “be known” to engage more contributions and participations from both internal and external.

Assessment Plan

Through the assessment plan, I realize the assessment is ever more difficult than I ever think. For example, we come up one of the outcomes “After completing the tutorial, 60% of 3000 students will score 50% better on the evaluation quiz.”, the outcome seems straight forward at first sight. However, what about the students who do well in the first evaluation quiz? It is impossible for them to get 50% better if they have earned more than 66% correct on the first quiz. Thus, the outcome has been modified as “after completing the tutorial, 60% of students (whose score is less than 66% in the first evaluation quiz) will score 50% better on the evaluation quiz.”, and it is clear that the outcome is unable to measure the improvements of the students who do well in the first quiz. And I even CANNOT find a satisfying way out to solve the issue.

Another outcome is the faculty’s perception of students’ understanding of plagiarism. It seems easy to conclude “60% of students demonstrate understanding of plagiarism” by surveys gathered from faculty. But the question is how to count the students? How to make sure each student is only counted once? And can we trust "perception" data?

The above questions are concerned with data collection and data analysis(hopefully, I'll talk about them shortly). And it is tough to find a perfect solution. The assessment process is more complicated than delivering the tutorial.

Actually, I have the kind of the feeling that libraries are "gathering data", like checkouts, gate counts, surveys, interviews, etc, a lot of data, but they are not ANALYZZING them. To some extent, experience of creating the assessment plan explains to me why assessing library services are hard and most libraries just DONNOT assess their services. I'm still looking forward to finding some good examples and cases.