Show Us How: Assessing Student Information Seeking Strategies Through Open-Ended Questions
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation (20 minute presentation)
Target Audience
Higher Education
Location
Room 1005
Proposal
At Creighton University, students are taught basic Information Literacy skills in co-requisite Oral Communication and Humanities courses. The Oral Communication component is delivered online, while the Humanities courses typically invite librarians for an in-class presentation. This approach is advantageous because it allows us to reinforce Information Literacy concepts at multiple points in the semester, and in multiple classes. However, our approach makes assessment challenging. This semester, we assessed student mastery of these concepts through the use of open-ended assessment tools: a group assignment (developed by the Oral Communication instructors) that challenged students to find and appraise one source on the minimum wage (scholarly or popular, by the student's own judgement) and a series of questions delivered in an online survey as part of select humanities courses. This survey challenged students to explain how they would locate sources (scholarly journal articles and books) on anthropogenic climate change. Both these methods are summative, and open-ended, allowing students to demonstrate how they have assimilated these concepts in more than one way. We administered the open-ended survey at two different points in the semester. The results have been interesting, revealing considerable variation in what students know, how much they retain and how they apply their knowledge to real-life situations.
Short Description
We would like to explain both the assignment, and the survey, discussed in the abstract, and share some examples of student responses. We believe this will be helpful in showing other librarians the kind of responses they can expect to receive (should they try this approach).
Keywords
Summative Assessment, Open-ended responses, Performance, Corequisite courses
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Dooling, William Richard, "Show Us How: Assessing Student Information Seeking Strategies Through Open-Ended Questions" (2016). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 92.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2016/2016/92
Show Us How: Assessing Student Information Seeking Strategies Through Open-Ended Questions
Room 1005
At Creighton University, students are taught basic Information Literacy skills in co-requisite Oral Communication and Humanities courses. The Oral Communication component is delivered online, while the Humanities courses typically invite librarians for an in-class presentation. This approach is advantageous because it allows us to reinforce Information Literacy concepts at multiple points in the semester, and in multiple classes. However, our approach makes assessment challenging. This semester, we assessed student mastery of these concepts through the use of open-ended assessment tools: a group assignment (developed by the Oral Communication instructors) that challenged students to find and appraise one source on the minimum wage (scholarly or popular, by the student's own judgement) and a series of questions delivered in an online survey as part of select humanities courses. This survey challenged students to explain how they would locate sources (scholarly journal articles and books) on anthropogenic climate change. Both these methods are summative, and open-ended, allowing students to demonstrate how they have assimilated these concepts in more than one way. We administered the open-ended survey at two different points in the semester. The results have been interesting, revealing considerable variation in what students know, how much they retain and how they apply their knowledge to real-life situations.
