From GSLIS Catalog: 

The course applies the principles of evaluation research to contemporary information management problems. It covers the fundamentals of identifying and investigating problems relevant to continuous quality improvement and communicating the results to decision makers.

 

-- Click the buttons below to go to course objectives, student learning outcomes, and course design specifics --

       

---

I. Course Objectives:

 To study the domain and purpose of evaluation, and the principles, design, and framework of evaluation research

 To apply evaluation research method to investigate contemporary library issues, and solve practical problems relevant to the field of library and information science

 To acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to evaluate LIS research papers and conduct usability evaluations

 To become familiar with the evaluation research process by designing a survey instrument and preparing a professional quality evaluation research proposal

 To acquire a basic understanding of descriptive and inferential statistics, and the ability to select and use appropriate statistical methods for evaluation research

II.  GSLIS Student Learning Outcomes:

•   Graduates demonstrate critical thinking in their practice of library, archival and information science
•   Graduates communicate clearly and effectively in a range of formats to a variety of audiences
•   Graduates demonstrate leadership capability in practice and service and in diverse communities

III. Course Design Specifics:

The class session will be a combination of lecture, discussion, demo and practice of specific research designs, instrumentation, and statistical notions. As a part of class requirement, students will be involved in giving group presentations on a number of chapters on evaluation of various library services (e.g., library users, physical collection, reference services, technical services, online systems, information literacy) included in one of the required textbooks. In addition, students may use GSLIS usability lab to run a usability testing session as an extra-credit assignment. The assignment allows students to apply usability evaluation principles to a real-life research experimental setting.

We will be using Internet resources and online statistical tools. We will also learn to perform very basic statistics analyses using SPSS 17 (PASW).

Rong Tang 2011.
Site created by Rong Tang December 2010.