Hi Everyone,
We’re pleased to hear that on February 1, the ACRL executive board voted to file the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This decision confirms the value of our efforts to envision a new approach to assessing students’ information literacy. The richness of the Framework and its alignment with librarians’ ongoing efforts to engage information literacy’s deep questions and troublesome knowledge, serve as inspiration to our advisory board as we advance to the next stages of test development. At the same time, we are glad that a final decision about the future of the Standards will be made at a later date, once librarians in the field have had ample opportunity to apply the new Frames and fully explore their strengths and limitations. We see our test development efforts as one facet in this wide-ranging project of investigating the affordances of the Framework.
In January, the advisory board studied the final version of the Framework. We found that the performance indicators and outcomes that we drafted in the fall closely matched many of the concepts described in the Framework. Reviewing the frames again inspired us to organize our extensive lists of indicators into core components of our key IL concepts. After further refining our lists of information literacy practices and dispositions, we defined four modules for development.
A taskforce of advisory board members formed to write test items that will take advantage of HTML 5 capabilities to experiment with a variety of innovative item types. If you’re looking for more information on innovative item types, you’ll find that Christine Harmes, Cynthia Parshall, and Kathleen Scalise have developed helpful taxonomies. The item writing taskforce is now engaged in the iterative process of writing items and performance indicators. Based on what we learn from the process of writing our first module and doing preliminary usability studies with our early item prototypes, we will begin writing items for the three remaining modules in the spring.
We're really excited about our latest progress and we're looking forward to updating you again soon!
--April