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Month: April 2018

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At Carrick Enterprises, we talk with librarians about their information literacy goals and their need for assessments that provide specific, immediate, and actionable results. Our customers have questions like these:

  • What information literacy data can we contribute to our institution's accreditation self study?
  • How can we demonstrate the value of the library to our campus administrators?
  • What role do dispositions have in information literacy? How can I understand my students' information literacy dispositions and encourage them?
  • At what point are students capable of critically assessing the information they encounter?
  • How does student information literacy differ at lower and upper division levels?
  • I want a tool that helps us know are we meeting our institutional learning outcome goals for information literacy.
  • I would like to guide my students in gaining a deeper understanding of their IL strengths and weaknesses. At the beginning of our IL course, I want them to explore what information literacy is and why they need it, as well as get feedback about where they can improve.
  • What can I tell my faculty colleagues about information literacy outcomes on our campus? I want to have focused conversations with them that lead to common priorities and collaborations.

...continue reading "Get Ready for Fall 2018: Planning for Information Literacy Assessment"

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Cynthia Mari Orozco
Cynthia Mari Orozco, Librarian for Equitable Services, East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park and South Gate, California, USA

Cynthia Mari Orozco joined the Advisory Board of the Threshold Achievement Test for Information Literacy in 2017. She is Librarian for Equitable Services, East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park and South Gate, California, USA. Cynthia talked with us about promoting information literacy through faculty collaboration and about the importance of recognizing the efforts of our colleagues. 

Question: Please tell us what you are working on these days.

Cynthia: We have a small instruction team that oversees a lot of information literacy instruction (ILI) at a relatively large campus, so we're actively seeking strategies to institutionalize information literacy across the campus but also to provide more targeted, intentional ILI. One project we are working on is creating embeddable information literacy content for classroom faculty in Canvas, our campus LMS, to provide faculty with easy-to-adopt resources. We also want to build professional development for classroom faculty in teaching information literacy in a Train the Trainer model, in which faculty learn about information literacy and work with a librarian to embed information literacy in their courses, ideally scaffolded throughout the semester.

Q: Do you teach? How has your approach to teaching changed since you started? ...continue reading "Meet the TATIL Advisory Board: Cynthia Mari Orozco"

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Carolyn Caffrey Gardner
Carolyn Caffrey Gardner, Information Literacy Coordinator at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, California, USA

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"

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Lyda Fontes McCartin
Lyda Fontes McCartin, Professor, Head of Information Literacy & Undergraduate Support, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado, USA

In 2014, my library Curriculum Committee started work on developing new student learning outcomes for our 100-level LIB courses. We teach five distinct credit courses; four are 100-level courses and one is a 200-level course. The learning outcomes had not been revisited in years and we had added new courses since that time. With the debut of the Framework, we took the opportunity to update our learning outcomes. It was at this time we began considering all of our 100-level courses as one “program.” An overview of the process we used to create the outcomes is provided in a C&RL News article titled “Be critical, but be flexible: Using the Framework to facilitate student learning outcome development.” The 100-level student learning outcomes are:

  1. Students will be able to develop a research process
  2. Students will be able to implement effective search strategies
  3. Students will be able to evaluate information
  4. Students will be able to develop an argument supported by evidence

Since 2015, I’ve been guiding the library Curriculum Committee through the creation of signature assignments to assess our credit courses so that we can look at student learning across 100-level sections. A signature assignment is a course-embedded assignment, activity, project, or exam that is collaboratively created by faculty to collect evidence for a specific learning outcome. Most of the time you hear about signature assignments in relation to program level assessment, but they can also be used to assess at the course level and are especially useful if you want to assess a course that has many sections taught by multiple instructors (hint – this model can be used for one-shot instruction as well).

I like signature assignments because ...continue reading "Assessing Credit Courses with Signature Assignments"