American Association for Higher Education



Bibliography

Assessment in Higher Education

American Association for Higher Education. Assessment Forum: 9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning. A short, insightful list of practical ideas about what makes assessment work.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. Liberal Education Outcomes: A Preliminary Report on Student Achievement in College. Washington, DC: AAC&U, 2005. Sums up what we know – and don’t know – about critical areas of learning, including information literacy.

Field, Kelly. "Federal Panel Appears Likely to Call for Testing of College Students." Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 6, 2006): Jan. 27, 2006. . Predicts that the US Dept. of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education will urge standardized testing of college students, with federal aid tied to results along the No Child Left Behind model.

Hakim, Musa Abdul. “Navigating the Web of Discourse on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: An Annotated Webliography” C&RL News, 63.1 (July/August 2002).

Covers SOTL generally, not specifically for librarians.

"How Productive is Your Program?" Inside Higher Ed January 25, 2006. Describes a tool for measuring department productivity in terms of publications and grants, not teaching and learning.

Palm, Edward F. "No Professor Left Behind." Inside Higher Ed Jan. 27, 2006. . Critique of the assessment movement.

Assessment and Libraries

Association of College and Research Libraries. Standards for Libraries in Higher Education (June 2004) The most common framework used for assessment in libraries.

Avery, Elizabeth Fuseler (ed). Assessing Student Learning Outcomes for Information Literacy Instruction in Academic Libraries. Chicago: ACRL, 2003. A collection of short, practical essays by various practitioners covering selecting tools, analyzing results, reporting results, and assessment methods applied in a variety of settings and circumstances.

Bober, Christopher, Sonia Poulin, and Luigina Vileno. "Evaluating Library Instruction in Academic Libraries: A Critical Review of the Literature, 1980-1993." The Reference Librarian 51/52 (1995): 53-71. A review of research, emphasizing evaluation of programs and methods rather than assessment of learning.

Bodi, Sonia, and Katie Maier-O’Shea. “The Library of Babel: Making Sense of Collection Management in a Post-Modern World.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 31.2 (March 2005): 143-150. Though focused on collection assessment, this article does a good job of pulling together learning goals with collection development and assessment practices.

Dugan, Robert E., and Peter Hernon. "Outcomes Assessment: Not Synonymous with Inputs and Outputs." Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.6 (2002): 376-80. An overview of what inputs, outputs, and outcomes are and how accreditation agencies are including information literacy in their emphasis on learning outcomes.

Fister, Barbara. “What Do They Know? Assessing the Library’s Contribution to Student Learning.” Library Issues: Briefings for Faculty and Administrators. 23.3 (January 2003). Looks at what large-scale studies say about students and libraries and examines the strengths and weaknesses of assessment tools while arguing that learning should be the focus for library assessment.

Flashpoler, Molly. "Information Literacy Program Assessment: One Small College Takes the Big Plunge." Reference Services Review 31.2 (2003): 129-40. Describes how several measures (multiple choice test, analysis of bibliographies, and an in-class assessment technique) were used to assess learning in first year courses that had enhanced IL programming. Argues such practical program assessment can be conducted anywhere.

Fraser, Bruce T., Charles R. McClure, and Emily H. Leahy.  "Toward a Framework for Assessing Library and Institutional Outcomes" portal: Libraries and the Academy 2.4 (2002): 505-528. Addresses the use of the E-Metrics project in ARL libraries and considers assessment challenges and issues generally.

Hardesty, Larry. "Academic Libraries and Regional Accreditation." Library Issues: Briefings for Faculty and Administrators. 21.4 (March 2001). Covers various accreditation associations and their approaches to libraries - as well as how libraries fit into the accreditation process.

Hoeth, Kathleen. “Meeting the Accountability Challenge.” Library Issues: Briefings for Faculty and Administrators. 26.1 (September 2005) Covers large-scale surveys such as SAILS, NSSE, LibQUAL+ and how they might be used to demonstrate the library’s effectiveness.

Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.1 (Jan-March 2002) This special issue includes a number of articles on assessment.

Lindauer, Bonnie Gratch. "Comparing the Regional Accreditation Standards: Outcomes Assessment and Other Trends." Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.1 (Jan-March 2002): 14-25. Analyzes current and draft standards from regional accreditation commissions, finding an increasing emphasis on outcomes, distance education, and information literacy.

Lindauer, Bonnie Gratch. "Defining and Measuring the Library's Impact on Campuswide Outcomes. College and Research Libraries 59.6 (November 1998): 546-570. Links library goals for learning with accreditation expectations and identiies ways libraries contribute to student learning – and methods of assessing the teaching-learning library.

Lindauer, Bonnie Gratch, Lori Arp, and Beth S. Woodard. "The Three Arenas of Information Literacy Assessment." Reference & User Services Quarterly 44.2 (2004): 122-9. Discusses ways librarians can tap into assessment efforts on campus and develop their own.

Lopez, Cecelia. "Assessment of student learning: challenges and strategies." Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.6 (Nov.-Dec. 2002): 356-367. An argument in favor of assessment and a description of the North Central Association's assessment matrix. Opens with an exhortation for librarians to participate. Ironically, though it argues librarians should be included in assessment, it avoids mention that the NCA has the lowest bar of all regional accreditation agencies when it comes to explicitly including libraries as an influence on student learning.

Pausch, Lois M. and Mary Pagliero Popp. "Assessment of Information Literacy: Lessons from the Higher Education Assessment Movement." Choosing Our Futures: ACRL 1997 National Conference Papers. An overview of how the assessment movement intersects with information literacy's emphasis on student learning.

Pritchard, Sarah M. "Determining Quality in Academic Libraries." Library Trends 44.3 (Winter 1996): 572-594. An overview of previous attempts and an outline of the issues facing libraries.

Ray, Kathlin L. "The Postmodern Library in an Age of Assessment." ACRL X: Crossing the Divide March 15-18, 2001. An interesting analysis of how changing libraries demand changing models for management, planning, and assessment.

Rockman, Ilene F. "Strengthening Connections between Information Literacy, General Education, and Assessment Efforts." Library Trends 51.2 (2002): 185. Includes some examples of how to go beyond testing and do more holistic analysis of long-term learning.

Seamans, Nancy H. "Student Perceptions of Information Literacy: Insights for Librarians." Reference Services Review 30.2 (2002): 112-23. A qualitative study, consisting of a survey, e-mail follow-up, and personal interviews with first year students to get as sense of how they approach research based on high school experience and their first term.

Warner, Dorothy Anne. "Programmatic Assessment: Turning Process into Practice by Teaching for Learning." Journal of Academic Librarianship 29.3 (2003): 169-76. Outlines assessments used in one library and shows what various measures reveal. Interestingly, while students did not distinguish themselves in most of the IL standards, they did well in Standard 4, having good evidence that was used appropriately in their “product” – which suggests that perhaps they’re better at finding information than they given credit.

Williams, Janet L. "Creativity in Assessment of Library Instruction." Reference Services Review 28.4 (2000): 323-34. An overview of how to construct assessments - primarily different types of tests, but with some consideration of using more complex tasks.

Wolff, Ralph A. "Using the Accreditation Process to Transform the Mission of the Library." New Directions for Higher Education 90 (Summer 1995): 77-91. Discusses how self-study for accreditation can lead to situating the library more firmly in the center of teaching and learning. An interesting description of how conceptual changes in how we perceive the information landscape and the role of libraries in higher education can drive teaching and learning collaborations.

Specific assessment approaches

Tests

ICT Literacy Assessment The Website for a standardized testing service that uses problem-solving scenarios to test students’ abilities to use technology and information. The sample scenarios available on the site ask students to present information in a graph, perform a database search using Boolean logic, truncation, and limiters, and compile product information from several sources into a table. The emphasis is on technology and on “what students need to succeed” rather than more abstract abilities such as ethical reasoning or critical analysis of controversial issues.

Digital Transformation: A Framework for ICT Literacy: A Report of the International ICT Panel. Princeton: ETS, 2002. A planning document compiled as the instrument was under development.

Project SAILS (Project for Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills)

Website for a standardized test that compares local with national results with test questions based on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. “We envisioned a standardized tool that is valid and reliable; contains items not specific to a particular institution or library but rather assesses at an institutional level; is easily administered; and provides for both external and internal benchmarking. With such a tool, we will have the ability to measure information literacy skills, gather national data, provide norms, and compare information literacy measures with other indicators of student achievement.”

O'Connor, Lisa G., Carolyn J. Radcliff, and Julie A. Gedeon. "Assessing Information Literacy Skills: Developing a Standardized Instrument for Institutional and Longitudinal Measurement." In H. A. Thompson (Ed.), Crossing the Divide: Proceedings of the Tenth National Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries (Chicago: 2001), 163-174. Describes the SAILS project as it was under development.

Colborn, Nancy Wootton, and Rosanne M. Cordell. "Moving from Subjective to Objective Assessments of Your Instruction Program." Reference Services Review 26.3/4 (1998): 125-37. Argues post-session surveys aren't effective and suggests pre-test/post-test assessment is better; the authors found no difference between students who had library instruction and those who didn't.

UCLA Library. "Information Competence at UCLA: Report of a Survey Project." . Spring 2001 . Describes a project to use a survey to test students’ skills and compare those who had instruction and those who didn’t. Found no correlation, but faulted the small sample size. Includes their test instrument (used by Flashpoler, above).

Examining Finished Products

Burton, Vicki Tolar, and Scott A. Chadwick. "Investigating the Practices of Student Researchers: Patterns of use and Criteria for use of Internet and Library Sources." Computers and Composition 17 (2000): 309-28. Studied the research papers of over 500 students and found that most students used both print and Web sources; the same percentage cited only print sources as those who used only Internet sources, and that students who had training in evaluating Websites were less likely to rely on them than those without training.

Davis, Philip. "Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior: Guiding Student Scholarship in a Networked Age." portal: Libraries and the Academy 3.1 (2003): 41-51. A longitudinal examination of student work that looks at changing patterns in source selection and the effect of altering the research assignment to take into account student behavior.

Gratch, Bonnie. "Toward a Methodology for Evaluating Research Paper Bibliographies." Research Strategies 3.4 (1985): 170-7. Analyses four studies and makes recommendations for improving methods of using bibliographies to assess learning. Points out that some measures used by librarians to judge whether students know how to use libraries, such as total number of citations or variety of source types, don’t indicate whether the sources were used successfully in a paper.

Hinchliffe, Lisa Janicke, et al. "What Students really Cite: Findings from a Content Analysis of First-Year Student Bibliographies." Integrating Information Literacy into the College Experience: Papers Presented at the Thirtieth National LOEX Library Instruction Conference Held in Ypsilanti, Michigan 10 to 11 may 2002. Ann Arbor: Pierian, 2003. 69-74. Researchers traced the works cited in over 200 speech portfolios and found that students used more books as sources than expected and that many students appeared to find them in public libraries. Students also failed to cite electronic sources properly, though instructors rarely caught those errors.

Hovde, Karen. "Check the Citation: Library Instruction and Student Paper Bibliographies." Research Strategies 17 (2000): 3-9. Doesn’t examine whether students used sources well, only whether their papers show an understanding of the catalog and indexes, making the (perhaps false) assumption that those tools are the only ways students locate sources.

Young, Virginia E., and Linda G. Ackerson. "Evaluation of Student Research Paper Bibliographies: Refining Evaluation Criteria." Research Strategies 13.2 (1995): 80-93. Describes a method of scoring bibliographies based on set criteria and argues for a more rigorous process; mentions in passing that in their examination of bibliographies students who had instruction fared no better than those who didn’t.

Interviews and Focus Groups

Fister, Barbara. "The Research Processes of Undergraduate Students." Journal of Academic Librarianship 18.3 (1992): 163-169. A qualitative study based on interviews of successful student researchers; found that they did not use a traditional, linear, tool-based search strategy.

Valentine, Barbara. "Undergraduate Research Behavior: Using Focus Groups to Generate Theory." Journal of Academic Librarianship 19.5 (1993): 300-304. Describes how focus groups with students revealed their highly practical strategies to minimize work when doing research assignments; a bracing reality check.

Portfolios

Fast, Margaret, and Jeanne Armstrong. "The Course Portfolio in a Library Setting." Research Strategies 19.1 (2003): 46. Describes how student portfolios were used in two library-taught courses at a medium-sized university.

Snavely, Loanne, and Carol A. Wright. "Research Portfolio use in Undergraduate Honors Education: Assessment Tool and Model for Future Work." Journal of Academic Librarianship 29.5 (2003): 298-303. Describes how a portfolio project was used in a course that prepared students for their honors thesis at Penn State. By keeping all assignments in a portfolio, the research process is made visible to students, librarians, and faculty, assessment is based on authentic information, and allows for student reflection on their own growth and understanding.

Self-Assessment

Ivanitskaya, Lana, Ryan Laus, and Anne Marie Casey. "Research Readiness Self-Assessment: Assessing Students' Research Skills and Attitudes." Journal of Library Administration 41.1/2 (2004): 167-83. Describes how an online tool was used at Central Michigan University to compare students’ attitudes and perceptions of their abilities with their actual abilities.

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