Call for Participants: SLIS Focus Groups, Simmons College, Boston, MA

Posted January 30, 2018

SLIS is committed to maintaining a high-quality, relevant program that is grounded in foundational aspects of the field, reflects the needs of the profession, challenges students to engage with and think critically about content, and prepares students for success. In an effort to continually improve our program, SLIS faculty regularly assess the curriculum using a variety of methods. We use data from those assessments to inform changes to the curriculum. Data from several surveys has suggested that student experiences of rigor vary across the SLIS program.

To understand more about how SLIS students define rigor and evaluate and understand their coursework in terms of rigor, we are hosting three focus groups to collect data to inform program improvement with regards to rigor.  These focus groups will be convened by SLIS PhD students and Simmons staff, and, while the results of these focus groups will be shared with the SLIS Assessment Committee, all of the data that emerges from these focus groups will be anonymized and the faculty who analyze this data will not be able to attribute any individual comments to any individual student.

We are particularly interested in students who have completed at least one semester of coursework.

The two in-person focus groups are scheduled to take place on:

• Monday, February 12th, 2:30-3:30 pm in the DCR
• Thursday March 22nd, 4:00-5:00 pm in the DCR

*Refreshments will be served

An online focus group will be held on:

• Monday, February 26th from 2:30-3:30 pm  

We invite your participation in these focus groups and would benefit from your input. You can attend any focus group, regardless of whether you take your classes face-to-face or online.  To aid in our planning, please RSVP to indicate the focus group you plan to attend.