Tag Archives: library instruction

Geeking out on assessment

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.

 

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Information literacy, millenials, and the presidential election

I recently posted on my Facebook page that the current election campaign is a helpful example in my library instruction classes, because when I tell my university students that they need to think critically about what’s true when they search online, and really examine the source of the information, the motive and intent behind a post or website, etc., they really get it. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review , “What the News Media Can Learn from Librarians,” seems to validate my point.

Journalist Louise Lief refers to “the framework of information literacy” in her article, by which I believe she means the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education which replaced a previous set of standards and thresholds for information literacy. Academic librarians have critiqued The Framework for being a bit vague, unwieldy to apply, and hard to measure and assess. Lief made it seem quite practical and smart, and suggests that journalists could learn from it.

First she notes that according to The Pew Research Center, 18-29 year olds are fairly skeptical of the media. Contrary to the over-reported notion that young people believe everything they see online, Lief notes that “Although they prefer to get their news online and are more likely to see it on social  networking sites, many don’t trust information they get there. They are more likely than other age groups to sense media bias.”

She goes on to say that in her view,

“The information literacy framework offers them a more meaningful way to engage with and manage information. The librarians encourage users to focus on inquiry rather than opinion, to evaluate a range of sources, take into account diverse viewpoints and perspectives, and to develop the ability to pursue new avenues as they gain new understanding. They also urge users to assess the value of information in its various forms. Is it being used as a commodity, a way to understand the world, a means to influence, a path to educate, or some combination of these? They regard users not only as knowledge consumers, but also as knowledge creators.”

At my university we teach students the C.R.A.A.P. test for evaluating information on the web. We ask them to consider the currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose of a site. Most of my students haven’t thought much about why online ads exist, or why a site with ads* may be selecting what and how to post in order to attract the highest number of clicks (and thus ad revenue). Another thing I don’t think students have generally thought of, and I admit I myself have given scant attention to, is that the very act of finding information online is rigged by corporations, as Angela Merkel pointed out this week. In case you missed it, the German chancellor said at a media conference that popular (and profitable) search engines like Google, and social media outlets like Facebook, are “distorting perception.”

What Google returns when you enter a search string is based on their proprietary algorithms. In other words, a huge corporation decides what you find out when you search for something online. And don’t forget, they are also harvesting information about your searches and profiting by providing that information to advertisers and companies eager to sell you things.

On Facebook, where many people get their news, according to the same Guardian article linked above, you are even more limited:

“This month, President Barack Obama’s former social media adviser Caleb Gardner highlighted the danger of filter bubbles – a phrase invented by the internet activist Eli Pariser. ‘More likely than not, you get your news from Facebook,” Gardner told students at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Forty-four per cent of US adults get news on the site, and 61% of millennials … if that doesn’t frighten you, you don’t know enough about Facebook’s algorithm. If you have a parent who’s a Trump supporter, they are seeing a completely different set of news items than you are.'”

Why does any of this matter? Most of us are not going to get partisan in our library instruction. But we can point out, as this Vox article does, that the real scandal this election season is how the repeated use of the word scandal, and others like it, has dominated media coverage, obscuring information about actual policy issues. Authority is constructed and contextual, the Framework begins. In the case of commercial media, publishing, and internet corporations, it’s constructed and contextualized in order to profit, first and foremost.

Should you stop searching the internet? No. But you should take the time to search beyond your own “filter bubble,” and to be a critical consumer of information. Think like an 18-29 year old, in other words.

*If you can see ads when reading my blogs, know that I didn’t have anything to do with them, but they are the cost of having a free space for The Nocturnal Librarian and bookconscious at WordPress.com.

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Creating lifelong information seekers

On a library instruction email list I read, there was a recent discussion that included an interesting point: when we teach the use of databases to college students, it’s both worthwhile and in line with our mission of producing lifelong information seekers and users to note that once students graduate, they can often access databases through their public libraries.

The thread stayed with me. First of all I like the idea of fostering a continuum of library use. There’s a natural progression from toddler story times to college library users (although we often lose them in their teens), and if we can pay it forward in academia by encouraging our students to return to their local libraries when they need information in the future, we should.

Second, I think it’s useful to think of what we’re doing in larger terms than just helping students learn what they need for the current assignment. Informed citizens are good for our country and our local communities. If we can play a part in preparing students to find, evaluate, and use information well, and also influence those students to become lifelong library users,  it will hopefully be helpful to them, good for society, and good for our profession.

As I prepare for my first full semester of library instruction, I’m going to keep these things in mind and be sure to remind students that the skills they are applying to their papers can be just as helpful later when they want to learn a new skill, research places to live or work, find out about health concerns for their parents and schools for their kids, and much more, and that their local library will be a resource for them as they go into the world. Do you talk about these kinds of things in your information literacy program? Leave a comment and share your ideas.

 

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