Abstract:
Instruction librarians want clear data showing the effectiveness of our workshops as a way
of demonstrating our value in education. This article uses instructional design approaches to
show how to make specific changes when writing and measuring our learning outcomes to
capture what we are doing in our sessions. Unlike instructors with classes that develop over
several months, we are faced with unique challenges when conducting one-shot instruction
sessions. By focusing our attention on student satisfaction and learning, we see ways to
improve those sessions for everyone involved. In this essay, we provide examples and
discuss how to write effective learning outcomes to answer specific questions about learner
satisfaction and what the participants learned. In addition, we suggest ways to reform the
evaluation and assessment questions that we use to reinforce our lessons. These methods
can be used in both online and face-to-face environments.