In concert with the mission of Centre College, the Grace Doherty Library serves to prepare students for lives of learning, leadership, and service. Information Literacy Instruction is one of the services the Library offers to fulfill this mission of life-long learning. Information Literacy Instruction also supports the College’s General Education Communication Goal, specifically, that:
To support information literacy during the 2020-2021 academic year, the library provided 37 orientation sessions, 44 class instruction sessions (Div I – 3; Div II – 35; Div III – 6), and 365 reference consultations.
To ensure Information Literacy Instruction is effective, instruction librarians assess information literacy instruction each year at three levels: satisfaction-based assessment, course-level competency-based assessment and program-level competency-based assessment.
Satisfaction-based assessment
Satisfaction-based assessment is concerned with the affective domain - student and faculty satisfaction with the quality and content of library instruction. Instruction librarians use Project Outcome, developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries, to gather student feedback on instruction satisfaction. In the 2020-2021 academic year, 145 students completed the survey and 93% of them Strongly Agreed/ Agreed that instruction met the 4 surveyed standards (The student: learned something new, will apply the lesson, feels more confident about research, is more aware of resources). These results exceeded our goal that 80% of students would Strongly Agree/Agree that library instruction met the 4 surveyed standards.
Instruction librarians use LibWizard to survey faculty regarding their satisfaction with library instruction. In the 2020-2021 academic year, 17 faculty completed the survey and 100% of them indicated they Strongly agree/Agree that instruction met the 4 surveyed standards (The librarian communicated effectively; the students responded positively to instruction; the session met my students’ needs; the session met my expectations.) This met our faculty-satisfaction goal that 100% of faculty would Strongly agree/Agree with all four standards.
Competency-based course-level assessment
Competency-based assessment is concerned with the cognitive domain -what students know or can do as a result of instruction. Instruction librarians assess course-level competency by incorporating a variety of formative assessment activities into each class and recording student success performing these activities. During the 2020-2021 academic year, 730 of 785 (92.99%) of students who performed an assessment activity achieved at least 75% on that activity. This exceeds the library’s goal that 80% of students assessed would achieve at least a 75% on the classroom assessment activity.
Competency-based program-level assessment
Program-level assessment examines student learning across courses in order to measure how students are learning as they progress through their academic career. It is based on defined student learning outcomes (SLOs) and has the goal of developing ways to improve the learning process. Instruction librarians gather Information Literacy program-level assessment data from two sources: lower-level data from the HEDS survey and upper-level data through the analysis of 500-level student research projects using rubrics.
In the 2020-2021 academic years, the HEDS survey response rate was 55% in Fall and 7% in Spring, insufficient to allow for any valid conclusions. The low response rate may be due to the fact that COVID impacted the way the survey was administered. In place of HEDS data, in Fall 2020, the FYC course capstone project embedded three information literacy exercises that applied to the same SLOs normally measured by HEDS. 95% of the FYC student sample found an article that met the criteria of the assignment, which exceeded the assessment goal for this SLO that 80% of students survey could correctly answer HEDS questions about finding articles. 86% of the sample correctly cited their article, which exceeds the goal that 80% of students would correctly answer HEDS questions about citations. 97% applied at least 4 of the 6 PROVEN standards to evaluate their source which exceeds the current low-level standard that 80% of First Years will be able to answer HEDS questions about evaluating sources.
For upper-level program assessment, librarians evaluated thirty-five 500-level research papers from PHI, SPA, HIS, REL, BNS and PSY (12 Division I papers, 13 Division II papers and 10 Division III papers) in the 2020-2021 academic year. Due to limitations on research projects caused by COVID, 13 students in Division I and II were unable to complete their project. This impacted the library’s ability to score these research samples. Looking at Div I, DIV II and DIV III papers as a whole, none of the SLOs set by the assessment plan were met. Looking solely at the completed papers in Div III, all of the SLOs set by the assessment plan were met.
Improvement plan
Based on the data gathered during satisfaction and competency-based assessment in the 2020-2021 academic year, instruction librarians plan to improve Information Literacy instruction and learning by:
Based on a process analysis of our pilot of the Information Literacy Assessment Plan, instruction librarians will improve the assessment process by:
Questions? For more information about these reports, contact Karoline Manny. Reference, Instruction and Assessment Librarian.
