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Student learning outcomes should describe what students should be able to know and do by the time they graduate from the university. As tenure-track professional librarians, the library faculty should discuss and agree upon these student learning outcomes based upon their knowledge of their discipline.
Library departments with instructional goals should craft learning outcomes to decribe the intended result of teaching or training interactions. Learning outcomes identify the knowledge, skills, attitudes or behaviors students or stakeholders will exhibit. The proper wording focuses on what students or stakeholders learn rather than on what the department is teaching. One can teach without resulting in learning.
"The student will be able to identify scholarly journals and popular magazines."
The university administration is interested in the assessment of an information literacy or training program. It is not focused on the assessment of individual instruction sessions or courses. The reason for this is that the university understands that learning is a complicated process. Test questions may be answered but not understood. Topics may be learnt and then forgotten. Topics may be introduced but not fully understood until later. The university administration is interested in what students know by the time they graduate. The library has time to introduce topics and provide opportunities for practice and reinforcement over time.
However, the departments and library faculty may also be interested in assessment of library instruction sessions and other activities and services. After all, if students are not information literate by graduation, libraries want to know where the probem(s) may be occurring. Faculty may try different teaching strategies and not all will be successful. Intermediate assessment at different times in the students' ISU experience can help determine whether specific instruction strategies are successful. They can inform librarians where specific weaknesses lie and what or when students have forgotten. They can help refine strategies and help weed out unsuccessful services and activities.
“Educators do not teach and then assess; nor do they think of assessment as something that is done to students. Instead, they consider the assessment activity itself an instructional episode.”
Arter, J. A. (1996). Using assessment as a tool for learning. In R. E. Blum & J. A. Arter (Eds.), A handbook for student performance in an era of restructuring (Vol. IV–10, p. 1). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
To select appropriate student learning outcomes, the library faculty will want to consider the ACRL Standards on Information Literacy. However, ACRL has 5 standards, 22 performance indicators, and 87 outcomes. This may be too many to assess within a reasonable workload. For this reason, library faculty should select what they consider to be the most important things that they wish students to learn by the time they graduate. An academic library need not feel obligated to assess every single ACRL outcome. And that's okay.
Learning outcomes should use appropriate verbage chosen from Bloom's Taxonomy. These action verbs reflect levels of knowledge and what students or stakeholders will say or do that make evident that they have achieved a learning outcome.
Academic libraries have a teaching mission but the library has unique problems when instituting assessment in the traditional way used by teaching departments.
So. How does the library apply assessment of student learning to its interest in student learning of information literacy?
Library assessment does NOT require that the library follow individual student(s) through their years at college. The assessment plan is more likely to take snapshot assessments at various points in order to get a general picture that IS GOOD ENOUGH to judge whether students are learning what libraries want them to learn or receiving the support that libraries hope to provide.
Most academic libraries are not lucky enough to teach a series of courses to track how students learn information literacy. It is great when an academic library can become embedded in a major and do this, but let's face it, we don't usually have that level of access or opportunity. But it isn't necessary in order to do library assessment.
Libraries utilize a variety of strategies in order to help students learn information literacy. A library may provide face-to-face instruction, chat reference, LibGuides, video instruction, webpages, subject guides, library events, and/or many other possible interventions. The library can put these efforts into a semblance of a curriculum map in order to visualize the Big Picture of their teaching efforts. Then methods to assess the components of those teaching efforts can be developed.
