It’s “intersession” — that golden time between semesters when we can catch our breath, catch up on projects like weeding and shifting in the stacks, and assess how the previous semester’s library instruction went. I love geeking out on assessment, and this semester is fun because last summer we redesigned our information literacy rubric and our assessment plan.

I’d been to some assessment programs and conferences, and had been thinking a lot about frustrations we’d had. I asked my boss, library colleagues, and faculty, “What are we trying to find out?” To me it seemed what we really want to know is whether our vision — that students can seek and use information effectively and responsibly — is being fulfilled. In assessing student work from first semester freshmen through seniors in their capstone research classes, we want to see if they can define their information need; find sources that meet the requirements of the assignment, evaluate the credibility of their sources; use those sources to provide background and examples, support or refute an argument, or illustrate a method of researching or interpreting information; and cite their sources both in text and in a bibliography.

In the past we’ve rated these things on a scale. But I played devil’s advocate last summer and asked “Do we really care that freshmen aren’t as good at this as seniors? What does that tell us that’s useful? Don’t we actually just want to know whether they can do these things or not by the time they graduate?” Our formal assessment will now focus on the capstone research courses in each major, and we’re informally assessing lower level classes in order to give programmatic feedback to the faculty, such as “Hey, everyone in this class used Shmoop as a source, maybe you should add something to the syllabus next time, and we should add something to our library instruction session, about choosing more rigorous sources.”

My boss pointed out that in many cases the answer to whether students can do these things is going to be “sort of.” That was a fair point, so we rate each of the criteria we’re assessing as yes, somewhat, or no. If we choose somewhat, we write a few notes explaining why, like “Most of this presentation’s sources are credible, but the student cited abcnews.co.com which is a fake news site.” (That was a fake news site, which seems to have been taken down, thank goodness.)

I’m about halfway through my portion of the senior capstones for the fall semester, and worked on the freshmen and sophomore presentations last week. So far the feedback from the library team is that the rubric is much easier to use, and I think we’re able to see patterns even without using a rating scale. It’s definitely gratifying to see that the seniors, for the most part, can seek and use information effectively and responsibly.

When we lead library instruction sessions we often worry about whether we’ve “shown them everything” or if we’ve forgotten some key resource, tool, or strategy. I think as long as we keep our eye on the long game — that by the time they leave the university, they know how to determine what information they need, where to find it, whether it’s “good” in terms both of being both helpful to their need and reliable, and how to credit the information’s creator, then we’re doing fine. The details matter, but the big picture is even more important. Because once our students are information literate, they’ll be able to adapt those skills to the changing information landscape they’ll face in graduate school or at work.

That’s worth geeking out about, and it’s also immensely gratifying. And, it’s at the heart of everything we do as librarians, from ordering, processing, cataloging, and shelving materials, keeping our website up to date, creating user friendly signage and policies, and promoting our services and resources to the whole campus community. I’m looking forward to looking over the assessment results, meeting with faculty and the library instruction team, and “getting to yes” on every assessment criteria in the future.