Catching up with information literacy assessment: Resources for program evaluation

Abstract

April 2012 202 In March 2009, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA released its triennial report on national faculty norms for 2007–08, which were based on survey responses from 22,562 full-time faculty at 372 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. For 97.2 percent of the faculty surveyed, helping students to evaluate the quality and reliability of information was a top goal for undergraduate education. Information literacy is the evaluation of the quality and reliability of information, paired with the ability to use that information legally and ethically. Academic librarians charged with developing a reliable assessment tool for their libraries’ information literacy instruction programs can find a wealth of resources that are readily available from both commercially and institutionally developed and administered products that are used among librarian peers across the country and throughout the world. In an article that appeared in the November 2010, issue of C&RL News, Jennifer Jarson provided links to several such resources. The goal of this article is to build on the assessment links Jarson provided. Her stated goal was to “guide readers to important resources for understanding information literacy and to provide tools for readers to advocate for information literacy’s place in higher education curricula.” In addition to the information on resources and tools, Jarson provided links to universities whose assessment tools were available for review on their Web sites. For this article, selected Web sites have been accessed and evaluated further. A handful of additional information resources have been profiled, including new Web sites that offer a variety of assessment tool formats.