Purpose:
Flipped classrooms, gamification, and multimodality are familiar concepts in education. Choose Your Own Adventure-style instruction brings together and builds on these ideas by allowing students to direct their own path through more traditional learning materials. Developing and assessing nonlinear content poses some significant challenges to librarians and instructors, but also significant opportunities to reinforce learning objectives, model behavior, and increase student engagement. This method also provides robust and naturalistic insight into student research behaviors and decision-making far beyond the pre- and post-testing common to many information literacy practices.
Design, methodology or approach:
This paper presents an innovative method for assessing information literacy skills that moves beyond the need for quizzes and feedback surveys. Prioritizing flexible, nonlinear content and building the tutorial in a platform that natively provides usage information gives instructors and librarians the ability to see the choices students make and the rationale for their decisions.
A branching narrative structure gives tutorials the flexibility to adapt to student choices, providing more information to students who request it, or skipping past sections a student is familiar with. By analyzing usage data, librarians can see the stumbling blocks, skipped content, and “best of” choices students make as the tutorial progresses, and identify unused content that could indicate a need for restructuring the material or changing the emphasis of their instruction.
By sharing key insights from the first year of Choose Your Own Adventure-style information literacy tutorials at the University of Washington and the University of British Columbia, attendees will gain an understanding of how these tutorials work, when they might be an appropriate method, and the challenges and opportunities of working with information literacy content in a nonlinear format.
Findings:
While this method has some limitations, key findings for this method are centered around three major themes.
Naturalistic insight into student behavior and decision-making: One key finding was the value of seeing student choices at every stage of the process. When large numbers of students selected one information source over another, expressed confidence or uncertainty about a skill, or self-reported the rationale for their decisions, this gives librarians a better understanding of student research habits, and an opportunity to tweak the tutorial and shift emphasis in response to student behaviors and feedback.
Responsive content that gives feedback to librarians at the point of need: Students had opportunities to express interest in new tools or explore familiar ones more in-depth. While some students indicated that the information was valuable and chose continue exploring, others indicated that the volume of information was getting overwhelming. The flexible paths allow those students to skip past the optional content to the end, reducing information overload, and gave librarians a sense of where this overload happened, allowing them to restructure the distribution of information or provide more static content, such as a handout, that could be absorbed later.
Low-impact assessment that increases student engagement: Because the tutorials were built in a survey platform, no additional assessment was needed for students to provide feedback or test their learning, and instructors and librarians were able to see how and if engagement and satisfaction shifted throughout the module.
Students who engaged in the content were willing and excited to explore non-mandatory paths and expressed a high amount of interest in the Choose Your Own Adventure-style format. Of the 180 completed responses, 77% expressed a high rate of engagement—selecting choices that indicated they “loved” the module—and 42% expressed a desire for additional tutorials in this format. The biggest disengagement point in the asynchronous module was immediately after the first question. Combined with the high positive feedback at the end, these results indicate that students who dislike this style are able to self-select out of the content—and that the majority of these students recognize their dislike quickly before investing too much time. Allowing students the opportunity to opt out and select more traditional, linear content allows them to exert control over their learning process and engage in ways that make the most sense to them.
Research or practical limitations or implications:
Developing and analyzing nonlinear tutorials can be a challenge. Restricting the available choices makes the content easier to work with, but provides less robust insight into student behavior. There are a few tools that provide an interface for drafting interactive branching narratives, but importing this content into a survey platform can be an intricate process. And while this method can generate rich data, any data extracted from a nonlinear platform will reflect the complexity of the content, require familiarity with the underlying narrative to analyze effectively. If a “branch and bottleneck” structure is used, with different choices eventually leading to a central node seen by everyone, the data would have significant gaps from any unchosen paths and selections, and the choices as well as the end points would be important information to analyze. Without an established framework of analysis or template for visualization, librarians may rely on limited results from a few key questions instead of synthesizing complex usage patterns into a coherent narrative.
Finally, a forced-path branching narrative will never be as natural as observational research methods, but this gamified assessment strikes a balance between the resource intensive observational methods and rudimentary pre- and post-testing methods.
Conclusions; Originality and value:
In the 1980s, Choose Your Own Adventure books were experiments in storytelling that put the power to direct the narrative into the hands of the reader. This style of content can be adapted for instructional purposes, allowing students to direct their own learning and flexibly encounter more traditional material. Choose Your Own Adventure-style tutorials offer a playful and engaging method for assessing information literacy beyond pre- and post-testing. The method has a low impact on users, but gives plentiful insight into student research habits, decision-making, and engagement with the tutorial content. Developing and analyzing this content can be resource intensive and challenging, but in contexts where such an approach makes sense, this method can revitalize more traditional instruction and provide ongoing, sustainable feedback for information literacy programs.
Learning , Services , Impact , Analytics , Innovative Methods , Data , Usage , Methods
