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Presentation Summary

 

Session Title:

What Do First-Year Students Know About 
Information Literacy and When Do They Know It? : a Pretest Assessment.

Short session description:

Librarians and faculty make many assumptions about the Information Literacy competencies of first-year students, but what do students really know? A pretest given during the first week of classes offers a demographic and competency snapshot that can aid librarians with curriculum decisions and making a case to faculty for Information Literacy instruction.

Assessment is the current buzzword of academe. To assess, however, one must have a benchmark. Wartburg librarians and faculty partnered to design and administer an Information Literacy pretest given on the first day of Fall Term 2000, to English 111 or 112 classes. Since all new students must take these classes, a valid picture of prior Information Literacy knowledge could be formulated before students were introduced to the College's integrated approach to Information Literacy instruction. Wartburg College borrowed this assessment approach from Appalachian State University, but unlike Appalachian State's test, which came out in 1999, Wartburg's pretest is based on ACRL's Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.

The presentation is divided into three major parts:

Discussion of how ACRL's Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education were incorporated into the test design. In addition, there will be an explanation of how faculty involvement improved test design and implementation.

An interactive section where audience members look at question design and try to write questions to fit ACRL standards.

Sharing of results from the first administered pretest in September 2000. Additional discussion will highlight how these findings have influenced curriculum, the statistical validity of results, how the test will be modified for future use, and the interest that this process has generated from librarians at other institutions.

Concluding comments will debate the "next step," which is what this process and the yet-to-be-developed follow-up assessments will mean for the Information Literacy program at Wartburg College.