Zooming to Success: Evaluating Student Grades to Make the Case for Online Instruction

Abstract

Presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the South Central Chapter of the Medical Library Association. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this project was to learn the impact library instruction had on Nursing Research course student grades.

METHODS: The setting of this research was an academic library serving a large, online nursing program. The health sciences librarians provided instruction to a population of graduate and undergraduate nursing research students. Intervention was a synchronous 45-minute advanced-searching demonstration in CINAHL offered to all students enrolled in all sections of Nursing Research. The librarians pulled a list of attendees from the video conferencing software and used this information to request deidentified grades of two student groups, those who attended and those who did not.

RESULTS: Data reflected an overall increase in student grades for those who participated in instruction. For the graduate sections, grades averaged 0.31 points higher on a four-point scale (3.37 for those who did not attend, 3.68 for those who did). For the undergraduate sections, grades averaged 0.32 points higher on the same scale (3.04 for those who did not attend, 3.36 for those who did).

CONCLUSIONS: Instruction was effective, but the dataset was too small to draw firm conclusions, which presents an opportunity for additional research. [The librarians acknowledge this research only demonstrates a correlation between higher grades and attending an instruction session, but hope to use this to advocate for library instruction in future courses.]