How do CSE students and faculty use the library?

A few months ago, I took a slice of the 2011-12 academic year dataset we've been analyzing through the LDSS project and looked at it through a different lens. I compared students and faculty in the College of Science & Engineering (CSE) to their peers in other U of M colleges, and to each other. Krista Soria graciously repeated her regression analysis work investigating correlations between library use and other measures of student success for the CSE first year cohort.

This week I presented our findings as a poster at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference in Atlanta. In summary, we found:

• Positive correlations between library use and both GPA and Scholarship (as measured by the SERU instrument) for first year undergraduates in CSE


• A much lower percentage of CSE undergraduates used library resources than did their peers in other colleges (65% of CSE undergraduates vs 79% of undergraduates in other colleges)


• About the same percentage of CSE faculty and graduate students used library resources as those in other colleges


• Patterns of use within each department yielded some unexpected results that have led and will lead to other avenues of investigation.

You can find both the poster and the research paper in the University Digital Conservancy.