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Assessment DOs and DON'Ts
Leave enough time at the end for a post-session survey so participants can provide thoughtful and constructive feedback. If they are rushed, they may not answer or provide incomplete answers.
Provide your participants context when asking them to complete a post-session survey. Explain to them the reasoning behind the questions and how the evaluation will be used to enhance future library sessions. Also share how past surveys have helped with the improvement of the current sessions. Encourage participants to be honest in their feedback.
Reuse assessment tools where appropriate. This lets you compare across time and between classes.
Think of assessment as an opportunity to improve your skills and services, not as criticism.
Act on the information you gain from assessment. There is no point in assessing if you will not take the extra step and make changes based on what the assessment shows.
Create new assessment tools for each class; some tools may apply to several classes. Maximize your efforts and re-use tools where appropriate.
Go it alone, share tips with other librarians in your library or in your discipline. Great minds think alike, pool good ideas.
Throw out an assessment piece that didn't go well the first time around. Maybe a tweak or two will help, and make the assessment fly on a second try.
Do assessment once and then stop. Assessment should be a continuous process, and you must keep assessing assignments, classes, programs, etc in order to build up a history of assessment and develop a broad sense of how your users operate.
Assume any one tool will tell you everything. Better a simple tool that answers one or two questions clearly and accurately than a "kitchen sink" tool that does nothing well.