Dominique Turnbow is the Instructional Design Coordinator at University of California, San Diego Library, and she’s been a TATIL Board member since the beginning of the project in 2014. Dominique has been instrumental in drafting and revising outcomes and performance indicators as well as writing test items. Recently Dominique and her colleague at the University of Oregon, Annie Zeidman-Karpinski, published an article titled “Don’t Use a Hammer When You Need a Screwdriver: How to Use the Right Tools to Create Assessment that Matters” in Communications in Information Literacy. The article introduces Kirkpatrick’s Model of the four levels of assessment, a foundational model in the field of instructional design that has not yet been widely used by librarians.
The article opens with advice about writing learning outcomes using the ABCD Model. Through our collaboration with Dominique, the ABCD Model provided us with a useful structure when we were developing the performance indicators for the TATIL modules. It is a set of elements to consider when writing outcomes and indicators and the acronym stands for Audience (of learners), Behavior (expected after the intervention), Condition (under which the learners will demonstrate the behavior), and Degree (to which the learners will perform the behavior). This structure helped us to write clear and unambiguous indicators that we used to create effective test questions.
Kirkpatrick’s Model of the four levels of assessment is another useful tool for ensuring that we are operating with a shared understanding of the goals and purpose of our assessments. Dominique and Annie make a strong case for focusing classroom assessments of students’ learning during library instruction on the first two levels: Reaction and Learning. The question to ask at the first level is “How satisfied are learners with the lesson?” The question to ask at the second level is “What have learners learned?” Dominique and Annie offer examples of outcomes statements and assessment instruments at both of these levels, making their article of great practical use to all librarians who teach.
They go on to explain that the third and fourth levels of assessment, according to Kirkpatrick’s Model, are Behavior and Results. Behavior includes what learners can apply in practice. The Results level poses the question “Are learners information literate as a result of their learning and behavior?” As Dominique and Annie point out in their article, this is what “most instructors want to know” because the evidence would support our argument that “an instruction program and our teaching efforts are producing a solid return on investment of time, energy, and resources” (2016, 155). Unfortunately, as Dominique and Annie go on to explain, this level of insight into students’ learning is not possible after one or two instruction sessions.
To determine if students are information literate requires a comprehensive assessment following years of students’ experiences learning and applying information literacy skills and concepts. In addition to the projects at Carleton College and the University of Washington that Dominique and Annie highlight in their article, Dominique also sees information literacy tests like TATIL and SAILS as key tools for assessing the results of students’ exposure to information literacy throughout college. Having the right tools to achieve your assessment goals increases the power of your claims about the impact and value of your instruction at the same time that it reduces your workload by ensuring you’re focused on the right level of assessment.
If you’re attending ACRL, don’t miss Dominique’s contributed paper on the benefits of creating an instructional design team to meet the needs of a large academic library. She’s presenting with Amanda Roth at 4pm on Thursday, March 24.
This spring I had the opportunity to attend the California Academic and Research Libraries (CARL) Conference in April, the LOEX Conference in May, and the California Conference on Information Literacy (CCLI) in June. These were excellent learning opportunities, as always, and I’m happy to share a few highlights from each.
