 Welcome to Composing Hypotheses, part of the research and assessment cycle toolkit offered by the Association of Research Libraries and made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. This presentation is part of a module that describes ways to articulate the focus of a library assessment project. It includes strategies for structuring hypotheses for library assessment. We hope the content is useful to library practitioners seeking to conduct library assessment projects. At the close of the presentation, you will find a link to a feedback form. Please let us know what elements were useful to you. Library assessment projects usually seek to close a knowledge or awareness gap, solve a problem, or answer a question. To design effective assessments that result in increased knowledge and understanding, it is essential to begin with a clear conception of what the precise gap, problem, or question is that is driving the work. What specifically needs to be learned about the issue at hand? One way to attain clarity and refine away any initial vagueness around the information need an assessment project seeks to address is to express the needs succinctly. There are three common ways of doing so, articulation of a hypothesis, research question, and or user stories. Hypotheses are often used in capital R research projects and are also and also can be used to focus in scope an assessment project. Generally speaking, a hypothesis is used to compare, contrast, or test an idea or relationship between variables. Hypotheses describe tentative expectations or assumptions about relationships between or among variables. Ideally, they're based on theory, although one reality that library assessment practitioners must contend with is opacity of theories in library science. Sometimes theories from other areas including education or other social sciences might be useful. Hypotheses should be testable and reproducible. Oftentimes, they're expressed in practice as a null hypothesis, which means they assert that there is no relationship between two variables. In these cases, the intent of researchers is typically to nullify the hypothesis, demonstrating that the idea that the variables are unrelated is incorrect. Let's look at a few examples. One might write a hypothesis as, students who participate in library instruction earn better assignment grades than those who do not. The null version would be, student participation in library instruction is unrelated to subsequent assignment grades. A second example might be, the likelihood of faculty participating in open access publishing is increased by them having tenure and or advanced academic rank. The null version would be, faculty participation in open access publishing is not related to tenure or academic rank. Again, typically a project would be designed around a null hypothesis seeking to disprove it. The major components of a hypothesis include who or what is being studied, the variables involved and a predicted outcome. Two major types of variables are included, independent variables or the variables that could be changed, manipulated or controlled through research design, and dependent variables, the variables that are observed or measured to discern the influence of a change in the independent variable. One way to think about this is that the independent variable is the if this statement and the dependent variable is the then that statement. Let's look at these major components in a few examples. In the first hypothesis, student participation in library instruction is unrelated to subsequent assignment grades. These students are the who, the variables are library instruction and assignment grades, and we predict that they are unrelated because this is the null hypothesis. In the second example, we see an if then structure in the hypothesis. If graduates do not study in the library, they will earn worse grades. Here, here the who is undergraduate students, the variables are studying in the library and assignment grades. And the relationship is that lack of studying the library results in worse grades, which is the null version of saying study in the library results in better grades. Of course, hypotheses driving assessment projects can be made more complex. For example, there can be a variety of variables, including moderating variables, which influence the effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. Mediating variables, which better explain the relationship between independent and dependent variables and control variables, which could influence the relationship but aren't under investigation in a particular study and therefore are attempted to be held constant. And so hypothesis construction with different kinds of hypotheses, different numbers and kinds of variables and different directions of relationships can get very complex. That is not to say, however, that they're not useful because they are, but one needs to think through the many and varied aspects that may influence the composition of a hypothesis to ensure that the final version serves the purpose of clarifying the focus and scope of a given assessment project. Thank you for viewing this presentation on articulating the focus of a library assessment project. Please use the link provided to complete a feedback form on the usefulness of this information for your purposes.