LIS403 COURSE DESCRIPTION

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.

1. 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

 

2. SLIS Student Program Learning Outcomes:
   
   1. Apply professional standards, tools, and best practices in the information field and across specialized areas. [Introduced]
   2. Communicate effectively to different audiences through use of oral, written, and visual formats across multiple media. [Introduced]
   3. Develop appropriate technology strategies across a range of information settings. [N/A]
   4. Critically analyze and apply research. [Reinforced]
   5. Evaluate and create information services and/or systems to reflect and respond to the needs of diverse communities and stakeholders. [Introduced]
   6. Demonstrate individual and collaborative leadership ability. [Introduced]
   7. Be guided by professional ethics and values. [Introduced]

 

3. 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, electronic resources, reference services, online systems, and information literacy) included in one of the required textbooks.
   We will be using Internet resources and online statistical tools. We will also learn to perform very basic statistics analyses using SPSS.

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© Rong Tang 2017