Badging Your Way to Information Literacy

Abstract

Microcredentialing, or badging, has become a popular way to certify achievement in a variety of fields, perhaps most visibly in information technology. Higher education institutions have started to investigate badges as a way to certify curricular and cocurricular activities and provide a more detailed description of the skills, abilities, and experiences of students as they go through their college years. Microcredentialing also provides an opportunity to assess and recognize student learning outcomes across multiple courses, rather than requiring students to meet complex goals within one course.At the authors' institution, the College of Technology recently formulated a competencybased degree program that includes information literacy outcomes for students. In order to track student progress, the college decided to use a badging system, and librarians were asked to create and facilitate an information literacy badge for the college's inaugural course for first-year students. The libraries have also been involved in working with a more conventional, i.e., credit-based, course for first year students in the college, which meets the university's foundational core curriculum requirements for information literacy. This paper describes the process of developing an information literacy curriculum for a competency-based program and provides a rough comparison of student outcomes between the traditional and competency-based course offerings.

Understanding Undergraduate Engineering Student Information Access and Needs: Results from a Scoping Review

“…Of the 44 papers included quantitative [12], [20], [25], [30], [40]- [42], [46], [49], [50], [52], [54], [56]- [58], [63]; 14 qualitative [27]- [29], [33], [36], [37], [44], [45], [51], [53], [59], [61], [62], [65]; 11 mixed methods studies [18], [26], [31], [32], [38], [39], [43], [47], [48], [60], [66]; two literature reviews [34], [35]; and one instrument development paper [55]. The included studies were published between 1991 and 2018, having a median age of 5.5 years, and with five of the studies [28], [31], [36], [41], [42] having been published after Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)'s Information Literacy Compete...…”

“…Papers were primarily published in the United States (n=26) [12], [20], [27]- [30], [33]- [36], [38]- [43], [45], [47], [53]- [55], [58], [59], [61]- [63], the remaining papers were published in Canada (n=7) [12,[25][26][27][28][29][30], Australia (n=4) [20][21][22][23], Botswana (n=1) [51], United Kingdom (n=1) [37], Kuwait (n=1) [25], Ireland (n=1) [44], India (n=1) [56] and Singapore (n=1) [50]. As indicated in Table 2, the majority of studies use a survey as a part of their methodology (n=24) [12], [18], [20], [25], [26], [30], [31], [38]- [43], [46]- [50], [52], [54]…”

“…The median sample size was 64 students. Several studies included students across different engineering disciplines, with breakdowns as follows: mechanical engineering undergraduates were the most frequently studied group (n=13) [12], [18], [30], [38], [41], [44], [45], [51], [53], [54], [57], [63], [66]; followed by first-year undergraduate engineers (n=10) [26]- [29], [32], [33], [36], [42], [47], [52], [59]- [62], [65]; civil (n=9) [12], [18], [37], [41], [49], [51], [57], [66]; electrical (n=6) [18], [41], [44], [51], [57], [66], computer (n=5) [20], [41], [50], [51], [66]. Limited demographic information was reported on the subjects; 12 studies reported the gender of participants [27], [28],…”

Redesign of Library Spaces: A Collaborative Project with Engineering Students

“…Librarians typically are involved with engineering curriculum and capstone projects from the perspective of information literacy and research skills. Examples of engineering faculty and librarian collaborations include developing conceptual models of information literacy and engineering design 8 ; creating design course or project research literature blogs 9,10 , and implementing information literacy badging programs 11 . Serving as a senior design capstone project client is a novel library-engineering program collaboration.…”

Work in Progress: Professional Development Module in First-year Engineering Courses

“…For its strengths in documenting skills and experiences, digital badging has been adopted for first-year engineering design and computing instruction [21][22][23][24]. Although initial results are promising, a longer-term assessment is needed to determine if PD components are effective in large lecture courses.…”