Librarian role‐playing as a method for assessing student information literacy skills

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners alike have long investigated the effectiveness of information literacy instruction, addressing what to measure regarding student learning and how to measure it. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we review measures and methods that have been developed to assess student learning that results from information literacy instruction. We then present a study in which we employed a new research method of librarian role‐playing to examine the extent to which college students are capable of demonstrating their information literacy skills while acting as an academic librarian. We also incorporated card‐sorting exercises, asking about their perceived search difficulty before and after the role‐playing exercise. Ten role‐playing sessions were conducted by recruiting undergraduate students who had attended an information literacy instruction session 3–4 months prior as a part of their English writing course. Results showed that the librarian role‐playing method provided opportunities for participants to recall and reflect upon what they learned from information literacy instruction effectively. Results also indicated that the role‐playing method is potentially effective in developing students' meta‐cognition about their search behavior.