At the ALA MidWinter meeting this month, the ACRL Board of Directors formally adopted the Framework for Information Literacy. At last year’s meeting, the Board filed the Framework, making it an official document of the organization. By formally adopting it, the Board is signaling to librarians who might have considered their previous action to be ambiguous that the Framework is here to stay. You can read more about the timing of their action at ACRL Insider.
In their post, ACRL’s president, vice-president, and past president acknowledge that there may be a role for standards or outcomes to be created in tandem with the Framework to support librarians’ ongoing assessment efforts. That’s certainly what we’ve found by working on the Threshold Achievement Test of Information Literacy. We’ve spent a lot of time developing and refining the outcomes and performance indicators that we use as the skeleton for our test. These guide how we create test questions because they describe the understanding, critical thinking, problem solving, and dispositions we expect students to demonstrate on the test. We’re excited to see how the ACRL leadership and membership work together in the coming year(s) to define additional outcomes.
If you haven’t checked it out already, visit ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy blog, where Donna Witek is posting weekly links to scholarship related to the Framework.