It can be a challenge to navigate accrediting bodies and their expectations for information literacy instruction and assessment. This is a snapshot of how folks at one campus tackled the self-study for WSCUC accreditation, including some takeaways that may help you on your own accreditation journey.
I joined California State University Dominguez Hills in May of 2016, in the midst of an accreditation preparation frenzy. As the new information literacy coordinator, I jumped right into the ongoing process of preparing for reaccreditation, which had started years in advance. In Fall 2015, as we geared up for our 2018 site visit, our campus created Core Task Forces. Each core task force was charged with analyzing a WSCUC core competency on our campus. These competencies are expected of every graduating student and include Information Literacy (IL). Led by Library Dean Stephanie Brasley, the IL Task Force began with extensive discussions about how information literacy is defined and where we can identify these skills being taught on our campus. The committee was made up of a diverse cross-section of faculty and administrators, each with different understandings of what information literacy is and how we can measure competency. While I wasn’t yet on campus for these discussions, the committee minutes and other documentation describe the task force’s adoption of the ACRL Framework definition of information literacy and the recommendation that we distribute that definition widely. The IL Task Force then began identifying where IL competencies were taught on our campus. Ultimately, the task force felt that retroactive assessment of assignments not intended to teach or measure information literacy outcomes wouldn’t provide an authentic understanding of our students’ learning. For those reasons, they opted not to conduct a one-time assessment project, such as applying an existing rubric (e.g., AAC&U) to collect student work, and instead opted to find existing evidence. The committee recruited students to participate in IL testing using Project SAILS, used existing NSSE data (from the general questions and not the information literacy module add-on), and explored program-level student learning outcomes assessment data. ...continue reading "CSU Dominguez Hills and the WASC Senior College and University Commission"