6 Assessing Your Information Literacy Instruction
Determining Your Effectiveness as a Teacher
How do you know that you have reached your goals?
Remember that assessment is a part of the learning cycle. Assessment demonstrates to students what they have learned and the results of the assessment illustrate to the instructor what the students have retained and are able to apply. Furthermore, assessments are vital for instructors to pinpoint where the transfer of knowledge is breaking down, so they can review and amend the individual components that aren’t working.
Assessing Teaching Success: This simple model breaks down the goal and outcome-setting process into each of its steps; it will assist you in discovering where breakdowns are happening and allow you to target exactly what needs to be adjusted to make your session successful.
Identify the problem. What do you want your learners to be able to do? Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, creating a learning goal and outcome. This step is paramount because it sets the stage for your entire instruction session. It decides your techniques, methods, and tools.
Develop a solution tied to that goal. What activity/assignment will facilitate the attainment of the stated goal?
Implement solution. How will the students demonstrate facilitation this goal?
Evaluate Solution. How will the student (and librarian) know that they have met the goal?
When a session doesn’t work, come back to this module. Did you identify the correct problem most affecting your learners? Were the goal and outcome tailored to the problem? Did your activity or assignment not match the goal as well as you thought it would? Were there implementation problems? Were students uninterested? Did the solution fail to meet their needs? Did learners just “not get it?” Did learners leave the session unclear about whether they had met their goal? This model allows you to pinpoint exactly what isn’t working and allows you to change individual components of the lesson plan instead of scrapping the entire thing.
Creating Quality Assignments
How to create a quality assessment?
When creating an assessment, three main points must never be lost.
- Tie the learning outcome (whether in a module, lesson plan, or course) directly to the assessment.
- Just like we should tie sessions to assignments, we should tie learning outcomes to assessments. The stakes are higher and more immediately relevant when clearly see the benefits of the assessment. To tie the learning outcome directly to the assessment one needs to ask: How can I determine whether or how well the students received and remembered the lesson.
- Note that there may be a temptation to create one assessment and try to make it fit each session or class. Fight this temptation by continuously asking yourself if there is a better way to determine the level of retention of the lesson.
- Keep the assessment as simple as possible.
- Complexity is great, but not when it requires 10-15 minutes of a 50-minute session to explain how to complete the assessment.
- Review the assessment feedback and make necessary course corrections.
- You won’t always agree with all feedback, but you’ve likely spent a considerable amount of time working on the assessment, and fresh eyes, the eyes of your learners, may see flaws that you are unable to see.
Instructors do not have to be limited to one assessment per learning goal. There can be multiple assessments to learning goals. Overlap is expected and can work to the instructors’ advantage in creating a clearer picture of learning retention. Further, different types of assessments may appeal to different learners.
Assessment Categories
Two broad categories of assessment are:
Assessment Types
Test and Quizzes are the most familiar type of evaluation. This is an excellent tool to determine whether a student has memorized information; however, it is not a good judge of whether a student has truly internalized the information or whether deep learning has taken place. In other words, tests and quizzes do not judge whether the student can apply the information. Application of information literacy is key for long term learning and retention. For online learners short quizzes can be utilized to see if students are engaging with the material. In lieu of assessing students’ body language, instructors in online classes can embed short quizzes to ensure students are involved.
Low Stakes Assessments
Low-stakes assessments that are great alternatives to tests and quizzes:
Cards- A low-tech in-person assessment that works well for instruction outside of academia is to place cards on each person’s chair with prompts to gather feedback. Make this quick and simple, for example: ‘Which one thing will you take away today?’ or ‘What would you like further training on?’
Minute Writing- This is a low-stakes assessment in which the students reflect on a concept or lesson. Depending on your students, this ‘minute writing’ is to take less than 2 minutes of class time.
Muddiest Point- This could be a brief discussion or a writing prompt in which the students describe which aspect of the lesson was the most unclear. Please note that like all other assessments- this is only useful if you review the students’ answers and apply it to the next lesson.
Peer Teaching- Peer teaching is when students are placed into pairs or small groups and have one student teach the others what he or she learned in the lesson.
Practical Application- Have students complete an assignment that requires the use of the information presented in the lesson by using it in a new way. For example, if the lesson has been about the evaluation of websites, ask students to select a website on a specific topic and defend its use as an appropriate academic source for a term paper or an appropriate source for a personal application.
High-Stakes Assessments
Examples of high-stakes assessments that work well for information literacy:
Class Presentation- This specific assessment tends to work best in a low-stakes environment as many people do have concerns about being in the spotlight. However, this particular assessment can be very insightful in determining whether learning goals are obtained. Students are asked to find, process, and organize information into a presentation. Note that these work best when students have access to technology and include a handout and/or bibliography for their presentation.
Annotation- Students summarize the reading or lesson plan, in writing, specifically pointing out the major points.
Annotated Bibliography- This generally consists of a list of citations to books, articles, and other documents. This should include a brief summary, as well as a systematic evaluation of relevance, accuracy, and overall credibility of the source (This is a great place to use IF I APPLY).
Portfolio with Written Reflection- An example of several low-stakes assignments that build into a high-stakes assessment is the portfolio with written reflection. Students save their work in a portfolio (either electronic or print) and periodically reflect on what they have learned. One can even require the students to give an example of when the information learned has been useful within their other classes or life experiences.
There are many creative ways to conduct assessments in low-stakes and high-stakes assignments. Remember to tie the assessment back to the learning outcome!
Another habit that is useful to instructors is to use a teaching log or diary to record your own thoughts and refection on how the session or event went. This could include reflections on the specific events and how to improve content and delivery, but may also include reflections on your own performance and development needs. This is a great tool for self-assessment.
Successful Assessments
- Include prompt, clear feedback.
- Are not set in stone. The option to revise or redo only strengthens learning.
- Allow students to apply and reapply skills and knowledge in a new way.
From the student’s perspective, timely feedback is central to how well they progressing in the course. Giving personalized feedback and returning work can eat up instruction time. However, students must know if they are on the right track and be given course correction when needed. In addition to this students should be given ample time to revise and redo work, especially if the type of assessment (such as an annotated bibliography) is completely new to them. The ability to apply skills and knowledge in a new way in the best way to internalize information. Students should be given as many opportunities to do this as possible, and ample time to share their experiences with their peers.
Chapter 6 Assessment
Best Practices Self-Assessment
Reflection Questions
- Why is it important to assess your teaching?
- How can you use the teaching assessment image to assess your instruction methods and strategies.
- Choose one low-stakes assessment.
- How would you implement it?
- Be sure to include audience, time needs, resource needs, etc.
- How would you implement it?
- Choose one high-stakes assessment.
- How would you implement it?
- Be sure to include audience, time needs, resource needs, etc.
- How would you implement it?
Final Assignment – Lesson Plan
Final Assignment – Lesson Plan (25 points)
Scenario: As the information literacy librarian at a small public university you will choose one learning objective for a group of 16 international students from China who have little or no background in how to use an academic library.
Task: You will create a lesson plan using the format from the Week 6 lecture. You must include one active learning exercise and a detailed description of how the learning objective will be evaluated.
