As part of a college-wide effort, the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College developed a curriculum-integrated information literacy plan, and adopted information literacy criteria drawn from ACRL standards and faculty input. A review of the plan with an eye to assessment as well as a revision of our ABET outcomes criteria and assessment plan led us to a second round of information literacy criteria development. We sought to integrate the information literacy assessment plan with the overall ABET assessment plan for engineering. This process enabled us to streamline our criteria and facilitated the development of a realistic and rigorous assessment plan. ABET outcomes criteria do not explicitly mention information literacy, but it is apparent that students cannot achieve many of the ABET outcomes without developing information literacy skills. Still, it is not common for these skills to be assessed as part of ABET outcomes assessment. Several mappings of information literacy criteria to ABET outcomes are available in previous work, connecting with several outcomes including lifelong learning, communication, and ethics. Because each institution develops their own set of outcomes, we did not simply adopt another's mapping but developed our own based on our understandings of our outcomes criteria. This paper describes our process in developing our information literacy criteria integrated with ABET standards and our ABET assessment process. We also share the emergent assessment criteria, expected measures of achievement based in student work, and our assessment plan which utilizes electronic portfolios, reviewed by a team that includes librarians and others skilled in assessing information literacy.
Smith College and has over 15 years of research, evaluation, and project management experience. Dr. Moriarty specializes in the evaluation of programs that serve underrepresented populations, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Her experience includes serving as project director and principal investigator for multiple grants through the U.S. Department of Education and the NSF. Much of her work has focused on developing programs that fostered Universal Design for Learning in higher education. Her doctorate is in Educational Policy, Research, and Administration from the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.