I’ve made a temporary return to City Tech to wrap up our projects from the regular academic year, including updating the orientation site, adjusting our citation tutorial and LibGuide, and analyzing our user test. During our user test analysis, we came up with a handful of best practices for online library resource creation that we would like to share at an upcoming conference.
We also made a discovery about learning styles: students’ perceived learning styles don’t actually correlate to practice. In our pre-test questionnaire, we asked students to rate their learning preferences, including visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic, on a scale of 1 to 5 (prefer least to prefer most). We then asked students, “For help with research skills like reading and writing citations, which of the following would you be most likely to use?” and gave them the options: watch a video, complete an interactive tutorial, listen to audio instructions, look at an online guide, read a book, get help in person, and other. Students were allowed to choose multiple options from this list.
The results were largely unintuitive. For example, only one student who identified as an aural learner selected that they wanted audio instruction, and only two of the kinesthetic learners wanted to use an interactive tutorial. Further, most of the students rated multiple learning styles highly, with five students rating two learning styles at the highest level, and a sixth rating three learning styles at the highest. Our conclusion is that learning preferences depend on the skills being engaged and the tasks being completed. Much like how I might not be interested in watching a video to learn about citations but would want one for makeup application, students may have responded differently to the direct question about citation help than the more generalized question about learning preferences. This conclusion will hopefully provide us insight into the modalities we use in future library tutorials.
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