Assessing information literacy instruction

I like strolling through poster sessions at conferences. I can get a birds-eye view of the sorts of projects happening in libraries. The ACRL Conference poster sessions suggest assessment is the order of the day. An article at “Inside Higher Ed” picked up on this trend, covering a conference panel on assessing information literacy instruction. It describes the First Year Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts Assessment project (FYILLAA), which grew from a collaboration of eight Midwestern universities and is now used by 119 colleges. The article notes that groups developing assessments are not always paying attention to each other’s efforts.

While it’s important that the educational community agree on standards, and the article references ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, it’s appropriate to handle assessment differently. The article references two of the well-known instruments: the Educational Testing Service’s ICT Literacy Assessment and Kent State University’s Project SAILS. Teresa Neely describes each in her book Information Literacy Assessment. Project SAILS, developed solely for ACRL’s standards, is for “programmatic-level” assessment. It measures incoming college-level students’ skills and long-term improvements. The ICT Literacy Assessment builds on ACRL standards along with others. It differs from most other tools in that it is “simulation-based,” assessing multiple aspects of ICT competencies by “requiring test takers to use basic technology as a tool to arrive at solutions” rather than posing multiple choice queries. Librarians working on information literacy assessment can get a good overview of what others are doing, including specific examples, from Neely’s book.