Assessment and Participant Feedback

We view any qualitative feedback we gathered, as well as quantitative data about attendance, as information we can use to improve future iterations of the programming.  In other words: we can learn from the data, and adjust future programming accordingly.

Our goals for the pilot were set based on historical knowledge of event attendance/student engagement on our campus.  We also took into consideration the realities of an urban-serving commuter campus: there is limited time for students to pursue extra-curricular activities.

Based on these expectations, we set these following goals to measure pilot success:

• 5-10 students enrolling
• 3-5 students completing the pilot program
• Publishing a library story and/or blog about the program.

We measured these enrollment goals by taking attendance during each book club meeting.  On average, we saw the following results:

• 8 individuals/session participated on average
• 13 attending for the orientation session
• 17 participants sitting in on the skype call
• We published 1 library story and 3 blog posts about the pilot. Links to these are in the Appendix.

Given our stated goals, we concluded the pilot program successfully.

Participant Feedback

Additionally, we also gathered participant feedback before and during the pilot of the book club.  To gather this feedback, we used Google Forms for the pre- and interim surveys. For the post-survey, we relied on passing out a paper survey.

The text of these surveys can be found in the Appendices.

Participant feedback, especially during and after the programming, was limited. We understand that the responses may thus not be representative of the opinions of all the participants.  Here is some of the feedback we received:

• Pre Survey (13 responses)
  • Strong desire to have open dialogue about current issues (“I hope to engage in discussions about discrimination, a prominent topic in today’s society, and hear the opinions of my peers”)
  • Interest in having a place to discuss literature (“…also I get to read a book … on school time so that’s nice”)
• Interim Survey (1 response)
  • Request for Community Agreements to be shared each session
  • Thoughts about how to get quiet group members to participate (writing out answers to questions, going around in a circle responding to prompts)