The Out Loud Assignment: Articulating Library Contributions to First-year Student Success

As more and more libraries consider GPA and year-to-year retention as relevant and meaningful measures of interest, it is important to consider whether these measures are locally appropriate. Several limitations of broadly applying GPA and first-year retention as measures of student success were recently discovered while completing a large exploratory research project. The project assessed the impact of a library assignment offered to students during their first term on campus at a large public research university. Findings revealed the assignment had a greater impact on regional campus students in contrast to the larger central campus, where changes in admission requirements has created an increasingly high-performing cohort of first-year students. Other indicators which may better locally articulate library contributions to student success are needed.