Champlain College: Project Description

✓ Student Learning: Assignment

(No) Student Learning: Course

(No) Student Learning: Major

(No) Student Learning: Degree

(No) Student Engagement

✓ Student Success

(No) Academic Intimacy/Rapport

(No) Enrollment

(No) Retention

(No) Completion

(No) Graduation

(No) Articulation

(No) Graduates' Career Success

(No) Testing (e.g., GRE, MCAT, LSAT, CAAP, CLA, MAPP)

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Instruction

(No) Instruction: Games

(No) Instruction: One Shot

✓ Instruction: Course Embedded

(No) Instruction: Self-Paced Tutorials

(No) Reference

(No) Educational Role (other than reference or instruction)

(No) Space, Physical

(No) Discovery (library resources integrated in institutional web and other information portals)

(No) Discovery (library resource guides)

(No) Discovery (from preferred user starting points)

(No) Collections (quality, depth, diversity, format or currency)

(No) Personnel (number and quality)

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Undergraduate

(No) Graduate

(No) Incoming

(No) Graduating

(No) Pre-College/Developmental/Basic Skills

(No) Other (please describe)

(No) Arts

(No) Humanities

(No) Social Sciences

(No) Natural Sciences (i.e., space, earth, life, chemistry or physics)

(No) Formal Sciences (i.e., computer science, logic, mathematics, statistics or systems science)

(No) Professions/Applied Sciences

(No) English Composition

✓ General Education

(No) Information Literacy Credit Course

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Assessment Office

(No) Institutional Research

✓ Teaching Faculty

(No) Writing Center

✓ Information/Academic Technology

(No) Student Affairs

(No) Campus Administrator

✓ Library Administrator

(No) Other Librarian

(No) Other (please describe)

(No) Survey

(No) Interviews

(No) Focus Group(s)

(No) Observation

(No) Pre/Post Test

✓ Rubric

(No) Other (please describe)

✓ Student Portfolio

✓ Research Paper/Project

(No) Class Assignment (other than research paper/project)

(No) Other (please describe)

(No) Test Scores

(No) GPA

✓ Degree Completion Rate

(No) Retention Rate

(No) Other (please describe)

• How does the project align with your institution’s priorities and needs?
• Why did you choose the outcome and library factor as areas to examine?
• Why was the team composition appropriate?

1. Contained within the college’s strategic plan, the college strives for distinctive academic excellence. The plan states that the college will become a national leader in the instruction and assessment of information literacy at the undergraduate level. This project designs and utilizes a developmental rubric with aims to build a longitudinal model of information literacy assessment. Using samples of authentic student coursework, librarians are leading assessment efforts on campus for information literacy. Ultimately, this project outcome investigates how we might build a longitudinal assessment of students’ information literacy throughout the course of their studies.

   The team composition for this project comprised the library assessment leader, the College’s director for learning assessment, eLearning production, and a faculty member. This team composition united the library and faculty with the key administrative personnel to allow for appropriate access to student research artifacts, as well as additional support needed throughout this project.

• What are the significant contributions of your project?
• What was learned about assessing the library’s impact on student learning and success?
• What was learned about creating or contributing to a culture of assessment on campus?
• What, if any, are the significant findings of your project?

1. In order to assess for information literacy, the library’s teaching librarian team devised a developmental, competency-based rubric that attempts to chart a student’s undergraduate journey in information literacy from emerging to proficient levels. This developmental rubric is designed to be used as an assessment tool on any student research artifact throughout their undergraduate studies, and may be used multiple times in an effort to chart and map students’ developmental path in information literacy in a longitudinal model of assessment.

   Although in its early stages, this project finds that first year undergraduate students performed as expected with sourcing and citing appropriate research resources for their research, but students appeared to have difficulty synthesizing and connecting information from their sources. The project will continue by assessing a collection of junior year coursework in order to plot and chart students’ development in information literacy over time.

• What will you change as a result of what you learned (– e.g., institutional activities, library functions or practices, personal/professional practice, other)?
• How does this project contribute to current, past, or future assessment activities on your campus?

1. The initial findings from this project has led librarians to examine lessons, and introduce instruction to build and strengthen student achievement in synthesizing and connecting information sources. This instructional redesign will subsequently be assessed in future iterations of assessment using the developmental rubric. This has changed the nature of the teaching librarian role in the college - to one where librarians design, deliver and assess information literacy instruction.

   This project also lays the groundwork for a longitudinal, cohort-based assessment model that will track class samples throughout their entire undergraduate students, charting and mapping information literacy performance along the way. This project provides a consistent, sustainable and structured model of assessment for information literacy. This assessment work also lays the groundwork for the library and the college to move assessment into the discipline-specific, non-traditional, and postgraduate divisions in the college, in an attempt to assess information literacy for those populations.

Please list any articles published, presentations given, URL of project website, and team leader contact details.

1. Team Leaders:

   Alan Carbery, Associate Director, Champlain College Library, acarbery@champlain.edu
   Ellen Zeman, Learning Assessment Director, Champlain College, reman@champlain.edu
   Josh Blumberg, Director eLearning Production, jblumberg@champlain.edu
   Steve Wehmeyer, Assistant Professor, Core Division, Champlain College, swehmeyer@champlain.edu