Contextual Background
The Archives and Special Collections Centre (ASCC), is part of Library Services at UAL. The management of Library Services has brought in a new KPI (‘Key Performance Indicator’) around our taught sessions: ‘Have the Learning Outcomes been met?’. There is discussion about how to approach answering this in reporting. But how we measure or answer this might effect how sessions are planned.
Evaluation
I with others in the library Academic Liaison Group have suggested that to begin with, we to survey teams on how Learning Outcomes are currently devised and measured. Results so far are varied.
Library/Archive staff often deliver a one-off sessions to a course to impart research skills and help them to navigate and find resources. In most situations we do not see what the students end up doing with this training. How they find, use and synthesise resources for their course work and final projects is assessed by their course tutors.
Therefore planning of our sessions is based on what appears to work, in dialogue with tutors’ requirements. We can include in our session plans time for written or verbal feedback on our delivery to assess if learning has been effective. But there is also a recognition that students get questionnaire ‘fatigue’. Or if verbal feedback, students may be shy, or yet unsure how to articulate in what they might use the skills and resources.
Moving forwards
In art and design, ‘research’ can take many forms. Expectations around what this should look like are varied (Orr and Shreeve, 2018).
In delivering ‘Research skills’ whilst there are some straightforward things to deliver that relate to other academic disciplines (e.g. learning how to reference, learning how to navigate an archive catalogue and request material to see), planning for effective learning of ‘research’ in a broader sense may be tricky.
Planning for learning checks throughout the session, in terms of moments for discussion – ‘how might you use this method of research?’ Could help to assess whether the particular skills (e.g. using an archive) are understood. This is something we already do, but could do more of.
I also wonder whether for short induction sessions, learning checks such as formal or informal quizzes, after imparting information could be useful. We could plan to include these as part of the delivery.
We could try to engage tutors in post-session dialogue or check in with them at the end of the term, after student’s course work has been completed – however the capacity for staff to do this on top of other things would need to be explored. But having further dialogue with staff about the structure of the session and what is covered could be useful.
For times when students are using archives as part of their course brief, we could ask tutors if they would mind sharing the course feedback they get with us at the end of term. This might also tell us which aspects of the they found activity valuable or challenging. This might help inform us as to how we plan sessions in the future.
For our Academic Support Sessions where we give students a research task towards the end of the session, it might be useful to get students to contribute their discoveries via a padlet. It’s something we already do for other sessions but could be something we could come back to as evidence for the students employing the skills that we have imparted during the session, and might also be useful for the students to refer back to, after the session.
References
Orr, S. and Shreeve, A. (2018). Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Abingdon: Routledge
UAL Library Services Academic Liaison Group, Padlet for ‘Devising and measuring learning outcomes’ (2025). Available at: https://artslondon.padlet.org/mcassaro/devising-and-measuring-learning-outcomes-cbbtsf4x39cvosag (Accessed 16/03/2024)