Assessing learning is an essential part of the educational process, including assessment of information literacy skills. I see assessment as having two aspects: formative and summative assessment. Teachers and Library Media Specialists guide students through the learning process using formative assessments (i.e. - rough drafts, peer reviews, individual conferences about student work). For summative assessments, there are a variety of methods of assessment. For writing and projects which seem more subjective, I favor rubrics which are given to the students early on in their work. The rubrics provide clear guidelines and targets, and allow students to work toward measurable goals. I frequently discuss the rubrics with as a whole class and individually with students.
Occasionally, objective assessments, like quizzes and exams, provide a better summation of student learning. The TRAILS (Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills) website does a fine job of providing this kind of objective assessment. In fact, I think it will be interesting to use this assessment with 9th graders as a pre-test in the fall and a post-test in the spring. I may even use it for my 11th graders to try to track the differences between the grades, as well as learning over the course of the year.
That said, I think it is important to teach students to reflect and self-evaluate. There is a fine example of a guided self-reflection based on the Big6 in figure 9-1 of our text (Murray, 2008, p. 90). I think these questions could be easily modified to fit nearly any project. I especially liked that the questions are designed to encourage students to transfer the skills they have learned, practiced or mastered to other projects. Ultimately, I believe that this is the most important skill we can teach our students - how to find information quickly and easily and how to transfer this skill to any subject matter.
Copyright and Plagiarism
The final LM standard deals with the safe, legal and ethical use of information and technology. Personally, I find this to be one of the most challenging standards to teach. Let's face it: we live in the era of copy & paste. It is so easy to just take information, ideas and pictures that students are used to doing it all the time without. It is our job, then, to teach students that they must give their sources credit.
Last year, with the help of one of my colleagues, I found Turnitin.com. This is website that indexes and cross checks student writing with an enormous amount of information: websites, books, encyclopedias, other student works. It then provides students with an originality report based on its findings. In general, I require students' papers to be in the green (less than 10%) to even turn it in to me. It's not perfect, and some papers need to looked at more closely than the program is capable of doing, but it works well as a learning tool. After the first time, students rarely try to give me work that is not their own.
We talk a lot about originality and giving their sources credit. I think the key is to hold students to a high standard. This year, I plan to introduce my students to the Creative Commons as we start to use more images in our work.
On a final note...
I especially liked a few ideas in chapter 9, and think that they can be modified to suit me in the English classroom. One idea that really stood out to me was the WWII Leader resume (Murray, p.93). I would modify this so the eleventh grade students would be writing a resume about an American author. We could then divide into selection committees, and "pick" authors to interview based on their resume! This activity would give my students practice researching, formatting resumes, and selecting candidates to interview. The real-life experience would be fabulous!
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