Thinking About Assessment

After taking the Library Girl challenge, I have been thinking about assessment a great deal. Specifically, how do we count/measure what we really want to know, which isn't the number of visits, the number of checkouts, the number of items in the collection. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that those things are not important, but in order to understand the value of the library, we need to see it as more than a collection of things.  The number of visitors is nice, but it doesn't tell us anything about what goes on while that person is in the library.  The number of checkouts is nice, but it doesn't tell us whether someone actually read what they checked out or whether that reading was of value to them.
A lot of libraries do surveys of staff and students and I used to do one every year.  This helps us see what users' perceptions are, but it still doesn't get at the heart of what we want to know, which is, "What is the impact of the library?"
I have been reading and talking with people about assessment.  I have seen several presentations on this topic, all of which have been swirling in my mind.  Today, I have an idea of where we might start getting at the big question of impact.  Now, my idea is not revolutionary, I would never claim that, but for k-12, it would be a relatively untapped data set.  What if we used student ID numbers (no names) and matched up some of the following variables?

1. Number of library checkouts and grade point average
2. Number of library checkouts and class rank
3. Number of library checkouts and college acceptance
4. Number of library checkouts and Reading/Writing scores on EOC or the test of your choice
5. Visits to the library and any of the the variables from 1-4.

There are many other variables we could use as well, but these would seem to be the easiest to get hold of by ID number.  I realize that we will not be able to establish a causal relationship by just matching the numbers, but we can look for patterns.  Do students who have more library checkouts or visits have higher grades, class ranks, college acceptance rates or reading scores?  Once we can establish a correlation, if it exists, then we can go on to the next step--see if we can establish the library as a factor in these other indicators of learning success.
The most difficult part will be getting permission to use the student data.  Then we will need to devise a way to match it up in a database and see what happens.

There are already a number of school library impact studies.  The difference here is that if we want to know the impact of our particular school library, rather than a general sense that school libraries are helpful to students on a variety of indicators, we would need to analyze our own data.  It would be a much  more effective way of assessing your own library and advocating for your particular program, rather than school libraries in general. I would love to do this as a project.  If there is anybody out there who wants to give it a go with me, just let me know.