MILEX Meeting, Friday, September 3, 2010

The focus of the meeting was on in-class information literacy assessment(s) that have worked for members. 

Although we know that evaluating learning that has taken place during a 50 – 75 minute library session is difficult, in today’s age of assessment and accountability, we’re not going to hear the end of it until we come up with something.  Where to begin?  What are you doing? 

Stephen Ford, Salisbury University

Background: Library Instruction is required for all sections of our English General Education course, ENGL103, a 4-credit course.  We decided to target this defined population for assessment of IL.  Since we are constrained by the short time allowed (50-75 minutes), we extended this by having students complete a short ENGL103 tutorial a day or so before they attend the library instruction session.

We embed a pre-test in the beginning of the tutorial to capture what they know of IL before any type of instruction, then we teach within the tutorial and during the classroom session, then we have them complete a post-test during the last five minutes of the class session.  The pre-test, classroom instruction and the post-test are all tied to a set of 'do-able' student learning objectives we have assembled from the ACRL standards - ENGL103 IL Learning Objectives.

Finally, we compare pre and post-test data within a semester to determine if learning has taken place.  We have used this method for the fall 2009 and spring 2010 terms, and will continue to do so for longitudinal purposes.

For the following data sets, one should compare the same pre and post-test questions (which may be numbered differently):

     FA09 ENGL103 Presurvey
     FA09 ENGL103 Postsurvey

     SP10 ENGL103 Presurvey
     SP10 ENGL103 Postsurvey

We also collected open-ended responses on some other areas that are not included here and we conducted a faculty survey of student IL learning that was less successful.