As teaching librarians, we are often in an out of classrooms and do not have the opportunity to see if our lessons of research skills and information literacy really stick. Assessment and measurement of student’s skills is a popular topic in information instruction literature as we see more and more value of wide-reaching information literacy instruction. It is important for librarians to see the fruits of our labour, learn what tactics and methods are working, and know where we should be changing our approach about reaching out to students.
These articles suggest a few ideas and challenges that libraries have faced when trying to figure out what exactly students are getting out of our instruction sessions.
Katelyn Angell, Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 34.1 – 2015
Compiling and correctly writing citations is an activity that is taken very seriously in academic writing. It falls on the library to be the support system that many students need to learn how to cite properly. As part of their Information Literacy Instruction program, librarians at Long Island University include activities and course elements aimed at teaching students MLA and APA citation styles. In order to measure their efficacy, they developed and tested a rubric that tests a particular citation assignment against librarian and instructor expectations. While their rubric was imperfect and will require revision, they deemed the exercise a useful component and hope to develop similar rubrics for other popular citation styles.
Bridges and Barriers: Factors Influencing a Culture of Assessment in Academic Libraries
Meredith Gorran Farkas, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Amy Harris Houk, College & Research Libraries 76.2 – 2015
In the library, we are sometimes called upon to represent the library’s worth to the academic community in concrete ways that involve some kind of meaningful data. “Culture of assessment” describes the working environment that supports the collection of assessment through formal processes; it represents a library that is attentive to its user’s changing needs. The survey conducted in this study asks a number of 4-year degree granting universities in the US about whether or not a culture of assessment exists at their library. Universities that claimed to have this successful culture attribute that success to institutional and administrative support for assessment, both in the library and through the university as a whole. Clear expectations and frequent communication about assessment were also noted as contributing to the culture of assessment. For institutions that felt held back from this culture, common themes were lack of administrative support, insufficient staff time and expertise, or non-consensus behind the meaning of assessment from the library context. In their discussion, Farkas, Hinchliffe, and Houk emphasize the importance of administration and institutional culture in the foundation of a culture of assessment.
An Information Literacy Snapshot: Authentic Assessment across the Curriculum.
Wendy Holliday, Betty Dance, Erin Davis, Britt Fagerheim, Anne Hedrich, Kacy Lundstrom, Pamela Martin, College & Research Libraries 76.2 – 2015
Utah State University attempted to gather a meaningful snapshot of their student’s research skills over several different levels of their university career. They collected 884 papers from students among an introductory writing course, an intermediate writing course, a psychology research methods course, and a history capstone project and subjected these papers to an already established and researched rubric system. Student scores did tend to improve among the students who were further along in their studies. While students were successful in finding sources for their papers, they often struggled with critical thinking, evaluating information, and synthesizing that information into their papers. The study gave the library some perspective that will allow them to develop programs that focus on the gaps in students’ knowledge and abilities.
Hilde Terese Daland, Liber Quarterly 24.3 – 2015
The one-shot library instruction is a model that most of us are familiar with; your subject librarian parachutes in to teach your students a one-off research tutorial. In this study, Daland conducts a survey study that aims to determine if the timing of these one-shot tutorials has any effect on students’ perceptions of the research tutorial. In one class, students received the tutorial as they began to write a specific assignment. The other is a general humanities class that does not work with a particular research assignment. Unsurprisingly, students who were working on a specific assignment were more receptive to the library tutorial. They rated it more useful, especially in the category of finding information, and made more use of library resources during the course of their studies.
