Expanding Horizons

                     --- Assessment Reporting for QEP Course Grants ---

There is no required format, and we have seen a range of submission types. One successful approach, however, would be to draft a brief narrative (2-3 pages) in which you describe and interpret some of the changes you observed in student work using criteria that are information-literacy specific.

For example, what did you observe about how well your students met QEP information literacy goals on the assignments or activities you developed (e.g. annotated bibliographies, etc)? Did you see any big trends, or common strengths and weaknesses emerge? Perhaps there are several criteria that reveal to you what more sophisticated research assignments look like alongside less sophisticated work.

Whenever possible, please integrate specific examples, or even quantitative detail about how your students navigated some of the information literacy components of your assignments. So for instance, if you’ve applied a rubric to student work or assigned grades to IL assignments, we would like you to share some of this data with us.

Finally, you’ve all made creative changes to your courses, and we’d like you to survey and interpret the results of these changes. Some of you may have witnessed dramatic changes, and others incremental growth across several assignments. Others may have uncovered areas of understanding that might need more attention in the future. These observations all help to tell the story of your experiments this semester.

Thank you for your commitment to information literacy.

If you have any questions, please contact Benjamin Harris, Anne Jumonville or Jeremy Donald (bharris@trinity.edu, ajumonvi@trinity.edu, jdonald@trinity.edu).

Here are several samples of rubrics and resources for assessing information literacy outcomes.

This rubric was developed by Trinity faculty during a series of workshops in 2009-2010 with consultant, Dr. Megan Oakleaf of Syracuse University. This rubric provides a number of choices, but is intended to be customized by faculty to meet their own needs.

RAILS provides a suite of information literacy rubrics and assessment resources contributed by institutions, teaching faculty, and librarians around the U.S. Trinity's First Year Information Literacy Rubric was the first institutional rubric contributed to the repository.

Workshops:

On September 18, 2009, librarian Deb Gilchrist presented two workshops to Trinity faculty on assessing information literacy assignments.