McDaniel College: Project Description

(No) Student Learning: Assignment

✓ Student Learning: Course

✓ Student Learning: Major

(No) Student Learning: Degree

✓ Student Engagement

✓ Student Success

✓ Academic Intimacy/Rapport

(No) Enrollment

(No) Retention

(No) Completion

(No) Graduation

(No) Articulation

(No) Graduates' Career Success

(No) Testing (e.g., GRE, MCAT, LSAT, CAAP, CLA, MAPP)

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Instruction

✓ Instruction: Games

✓ Instruction: One Shot

(No) Instruction: Course Embedded

(No) Instruction: Self-Paced Tutorials

(No) Reference

(No) Educational Role (other than reference or instruction)

(No) Space, Physical

(No) Discovery (library resources integrated in institutional web and other information portals)

(No) Discovery (library resource guides)

(No) Discovery (from preferred user starting points)

(No) Collections (quality, depth, diversity, format or currency)

(No) Personnel (number and quality)

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Undergraduate

(No) Graduate

(No) Incoming

(No) Graduating

(No) Pre-College/Developmental/Basic Skills

(No) Other (please describe)

(No) Arts

✓ Humanities

(No) Social Sciences

(No) Natural Sciences (i.e., space, earth, life, chemistry or physics)

(No) Formal Sciences (i.e., computer science, logic, mathematics, statistics or systems science)

(No) Professions/Applied Sciences

✓ English Composition

(No) General Education

(No) Information Literacy Credit Course

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Assessment Office

✓ Institutional Research

✓ Teaching Faculty

✓ Writing Center

(No) Information/Academic Technology

(No) Student Affairs

(No) Campus Administrator

(No) Library Administrator

(No) Other Librarian

(No) Other (please describe)

(No) Survey

(No) Interviews

(No) Focus Group(s)

✓ Observation

✓ Pre/Post Test

✓ Rubric

(No) Other (please describe)

(No) Student Portfolio

(No) Research Paper/Project

(No) Class Assignment (other than research paper/project)

✓ Other (please describe)

(No) Test Scores

(No) GPA

(No) Degree Completion Rate

(No) Retention Rate

✓ Other (please describe)

• How does the project align with your institution’s priorities and needs?
• Why did you choose the outcome and library factor as areas to examine?
• Why was the team composition appropriate?

1. Our institution is searching for both ways to combat instances of plagiarism and to deliver library instruction in innovative and interesting ways. When thinking about developing this project, both institutional goals provided a path towards the project framework. As a small, liberal-arts college we were free to think of ways to make the class both helpful and entertaining without much administrative oversight.

   Team Appropriateness:
   The director of the writing centre was an obvious choice because his office deals more directly with issues of plagiarism. The Director of institutional research was there to provide institutional data and check our assessment protocols. English department faculty shared our interest in innovation and were crucial in developing the 'game' elements and in allowing us to experiment in their classes and our Communications faculty provided a great deal of help in checking our statistics and assessment measures, and in helping with our communication of data.

• What are the significant contributions of your project?
• What was learned about assessing the library’s impact on student learning and success?
• What was learned about creating or contributing to a culture of assessment on campus?
• What, if any, are the significant findings of your project?

1. Our project adds to the growing bibliography of game-based learning and its effectiveness. We learned through the course of our research that students do hold a base-line understanding of the concepts behind plagiarism, but that they simply cannot connect the rules with the practice. Put another way, they do not understand how citation and proper academic writing processes help their work. Our data illustrates that students need direct intervention to begin to understand this connection. This project has been used on our campus to keep the workshop going and it has been integrated into the First Year Experience starting this fall. The library has firmly rooted itself as a vital partner in the education of our students through this project.

• What will you change as a result of what you learned (– e.g., institutional activities, library functions or practices, personal/professional practice, other)?
• How does this project contribute to current, past, or future assessment activities on your campus?

1. The First Year Experience and Student Success office have been extremely supportive and excited with our findings and have integrated our workshop into the curriculum for First Year students. From the library's perspective, this project adds to our growing roster of assessment projects, but perhaps in a more meaningful way. Other assessment projects have focused on library facets, not on student success. It has been my goal as a librarian not to focus too much on inward, library thinking, but to think first of the user and their needs. I think this project works towards that professional goal. Additionally, our instruction coordinator has been interested in this workshop and how she can integrate the methods we used into her overall IL program.

Please list any articles published, presentations given, URL of project website, and team leader contact details.

1. All of the team members are committed, as am I, to long-term commitment to this project. We plan to publish a paper with our findings as well as an interactive website where people can download game material to run it at their institution.
   When/if this article is published, I will share with the AiA groups.

   Team Leader:

   Jordan Sly, Research & Instruction Librarian: User Experience
   jsly@mcdaniel.edu , jordsly@gmail.com
   410-386-2679 (w) , 301-906-2619 (m)