Writing Information Literacy Assessment Plans: A Guide to Best Practice

Academic librarians throughout higher education add value to the teaching and learning missions of their institutions though information literacy instruction. To demonstrate the full impact of librarians on students in higher education, librarians need comprehensive information literacy assessment plans, composed of instructional program-level and outcome-level components, that summarize the purpose of information literacy assessment, emphasize the theoretical basis of their assessment efforts, articulate specific information literacy goals and outcomes, describe the major assessment methods and tools used to capture evidence of student learning, report assessment results, and highlight improvements made as a consequence of learning assessment

Planning, Building, and Assessing an Online Information Literacy Tutorial: The LOBO Experience

Each fall, first-year students arrive at colleges across the country with widely varying abilities to complete library research assignments. Some students enter higher education as veterans of the information seeking process, armed with strong school library media preparation and ready to conquer any research assignment. Far more first-year students are over-reliant on Internet resources, confused about distinctions between scholarly and popular sources, daunted by scores of article databases, and mystified by the LC classification system. Academic librarians face the challenge of establishing baseline information literacy skills in all students, often with limited time and resources. One way to confront this challenge facing academic librarians is an online information literacy tutorial

There’s a standard for that: Aligning academic aspirations, professional standards, and ALA accreditation

The Syracuse University library and information science (LIS) program has committed to a new focus on INformation Justice, Equity, and Community EngagemenT (INJECT) that will guide a redesign of our program and redefine our commitment to our students, our coursework, and our impact on the information profession and broader community. While INJECT concepts form the bedrock of our new curriculum, our program is committed to being responsive to library professional standards as well as the ALA Standards for Accreditation of Master’s Programs in Library and Information Studies. Professional standards produced by library associations including ALA, IFLA, ACRL, SLA, RUSA, and YALSA reflect the needs of the library profession and impact the knowledge, skills, abilities, and dispositions librarians need to learn. In designing professional curriculum, LIS faculty must respond to and design for existing standards and competency lists in order to create a program that correlates with the ideals held by various library organizations. At the same time, LIS programs must demonstrate alignment with ALA Standards for Accreditation. So, how do the various competency lists compare to accreditation standards? How do the competencies and standards support INJECT topics, including critical librarianship, social justice, and equity and where do they fall short? This poster reveals an analysis and alignment of professional standards, accreditation standards, and our aspirations to better represent information justice, equity, and community engagement in LIS. This work can enable faculty to transform LIS curricula and create a resilient future for our programs, our student, and the broader LIS profession

Assessing Information Literacy Skills: A Rubric Approach

Academic librarians should explore new approaches to the assessment of information literacy skills. Satisfaction surveys and input/output measures do not provide librarians with adequate information about what students know and can do. Standardized multiple-choice tests and large-scale performance assessments also fail to provide the data librarians need to improve instruction locally. Librarians, facing accountability issues and possessing the desire to improve student learning, require a new approach to library instruction assessment. This study investigated the viability of a rubric approach to information literacy assessment and examined an analytic information literacy rubric designed to assess students' ability to evaluate website authority. The study addressed these questions: (1) To what degree can different groups of raters provide consistent scoring of student learning artifacts using a rubric? (2) To what degree can raters provide scores consistent with those assigned by the researcher? (3) To what degree can students use authority as a criterion to evaluate websites? This study revealed that multiple raters can use rubrics to produce consistent scoring of information literacy artifacts of student learning; however, different groups of raters in this study arrived at varying levels of agreement. For example, ENG 101 instructors produced significantly higher reliabilities than NCSU librarians and ENG 101 students, and NCSU librarians produced remarkably higher levels of agreement than external instruction and reference librarians. In addition to providing important findings regarding the five original rater groups, this study documented the emergence of an "expert" rater group, identified through kappa statistics and a "gold standard" approach to the examination of validity. These raters not only approximated the researcher's scores, they also achieved higher levels of agreement than any of the five original groups. This study suggests that librarians may require substantial training to overcome barriers blocking expert rater status. Finally, this study found that most students can cite specific indicators of authority when evaluating a website. Nearly all students can locate and identify these authority indicators in a website. However, many students have difficulty choosing an appropriate website for a specific assignment and providing a rationale for their choice

Project RAILS: Lessons Learned about Collaborative Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills

Rubric assessment of information literacy is an important tool for librarians seeking to show evidence of student learning. The authors, who collaborated on the Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (RAILS) research project, draw from their shared experience to present practical recommendations for implementing rubric assessment in a variety of institutional contexts. These recommendations focus on four areas: (1) building successful collaborative relationships, (2) developing assignments, (3) creating and using rubrics, and (4) using assessment results to improve instruction and assessment practices. Recommendations are discussed in detail and include institutional examples of emerging practices that can be adapted for local use

Examining Design and Inter-Rater Reliability of a Rubric Measuring Research Quality across Multiple Disciplines

The paper presents a rubric to help evaluate the quality of research projects. The rubric was applied in a competition across a variety of disciplines during a two-day research symposium at one institution in the southwest region of the United States of America. It was collaboratively designed by a faculty committee at the institution and was administered to 204 undergraduate, master, and doctoral oral presentations by approximately 167 different evaluators. No training or norming of the rubric was given to 147 of the evaluators prior to the competition. The findings of the inter-rater reliability analysis reveal substantial agreement among the judges, which contradicts literature describing the fact that formal norming must occur prior to seeing substantial levels of inter-rater reliability. By presenting the rubric along with the methodology used in its design and evaluation, it is hoped that others will find this to be a useful tool for evaluating documents and for teaching research methods. Accessed 15,405 times on https://pareonline.net from May 29, 2009 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

Notes from the Field: 10 Short Lessons on One-Shot Instruction

Librarians teach. It might not be what they planned to do when they entered the profession, or it may have been a secret hope all along. Either way, librarians teach, and one teaching scenario remains quintessential: the one-shot library instruction session. In recognition of the centrality of the one-shot, this article shares several authors\u27 notes from the field. The notes provide a range of strategies for developing pedagogically sound one-shot library instruction sessions, grouped loosely into three categories: planning, delivery, and integration. The authors offer these insights in their own words in hopes that other teaching librarians may benefit from their experiences

Writing Information Literacy Assessment Plans: A Guide to Best Practice

Academic librarians throughout higher education add value to the teaching and learning missions of their institutions though information literacy instruction. To demonstrate the full impact of librarians on students in higher education, librarians need comprehensive information literacy assessment plans, composed of instructional program-level and outcome-level components, that summarize the purpose of information literacy assessment, emphasize the theoretical basis of their assessment efforts, articulate specific information literacy goals and outcomes, describe the major assessment methods and tools used to capture evidence of student learning, report assessment results, and highlight improvements made as a consequence of learning assessment

Recruiting for Results: Assessment Skills and the Academic Library Job Market

The purpose of this study was to explore the discrete assessment skills included in the recruitment process for academic librarians, to discover the ways in which assessment skills are represented as requirements for academic librarian positions, and to explore the degree to which prevailing recruiting practices contribute to the establishment of a sustainable "culture of assessment" in academic libraries.unpublishedis peer reviewe