Assessment of Student Learning

Academic assessment plans

The Libraries is currently developing an instruction program assessment plan for 2023-2026.

Academic assessment reports

Assessment goals

  • Support student learning in general education courses
  • Inform the library instruction program

Designing and implementing assessment projects

We partner with teaching faculty, administrators, and liaison librarians to design and implement assessment projects at the class session, course, and program levels.

This most typically takes the form of examining student artifacts such as research papers, posters, presentations, portfolios, and classroom activities in order to identify and evaluate the research, inquiry, and critical thinking skills of our students.

Collaborating with us

Faculty interested in collaborating on information literacy assessment projects should contact Rosan Mitola, Head of the Educational Initiatives Department at rosan.mitola@unlv.edu.

Assessment Activities Examples

Synthesis in Creative Research Projects

We identified courses where disciplinary faculty have attended the UNLV Libraries Faculty Institute on Creative Research Assignments and assessed 21 student artifacts that included interviews, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, and websites to identify how well students are able to synthesize multiple information sources and credit the work of others. This informed our work with the Faculty Institutes moving forward.

ENG 102 Annotated Bibliographies

Every summer, we evaluate a random sample of annotated bibliographies produced by students enrolled in ENG 102 during the previous fall and spring semesters. This evaluation informs the learning outcomes and teaching activities of our ENG 102 library instruction program, which is a particular area of emphasis for our department.

Evaluation of First Year Student Research Topics

We partnered with an ENG 102 graduate teaching assistant to develop a mixed-method study of first-year students’ research topics: a rubric to evaluate the scope and feasibility of student topics and a textual analysis to examine the types of subjects students most typically select for an argument-based research paper.

The results of our study were published in College and Research Libraries:

Rinto, E., Bowles-Terry, M., & Santos, A. (2017). Assessing the Scope and Feasibility of First-Year Students’ Research Paper Topics. College & Research Libraries, 77(6). doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.v77i6.16554

Milestone and Culminating Experiences

Assessment of Student Work from Milestone and Culminating Experiences: Assessment activities have also examined student work from upper division general education courses. Faculty participating in our Faculty Institute series submit samples of student work that are then collaboratively evaluated with rubrics in order to identify developmentally-appropriate information literacy, research, and inquiry skills in students beyond the first year.

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