Through the Looking Glass: Viewing First-Year Composition Through the Lens of Information Literacy

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of how librarians can situate themselves as pedagogical partners by bringing their unique information literacy perspective and expertise to the programmatic assessment process. This report resulted from the Thun Library and the Penn State Berks Composition Program's collaboration to assess the institution's first-year composition (FYC) course. From previous programmatic assessments of their students' work, the faculty knew that students struggled with source use in their rhetoric but found it difficult to pinpoint students' exact source issues. By adapting a rubric theoreticallygrounded in the ACRL Framework to deconstruct the concept of source use into four categories, librarians developed a rubric that illuminated source engagement problems on a more granular level than the programmatic assessments conducted without librarian involvement, leading to specific suggestions for addressing issues with student source engagement.

Chapter 8. No Such Thing as a Bad Question: Using Rubrics to Help Students Learn from and Strengthen Failed Research Questions

“…Rubrics offer great promise for effectively assessing students' research questions, as Oakleaf (2009, 970) notes that rubrics create "agreed-upon values of student learning" between university librarians and faculty as well as provide detailed assessment data that can increase consistency across assessments. In fact, rubrics have been used to evaluate students' information literacy skills, including their ability to find quality sources, find varied sources, annotate sources, effectively use sources in writing, and accurately cite sources (Carbery and Leahy 2015;Chisholm and Spencer 2019;Daniels 2010;Gola et al 2014;Jastram, Leebaw, and Tompkins 2014;Lantz, Inusa, and Armstrong 2016;Rinto 2013;Rinto and Cogbill-Seiders 2014;Rosenblatt 2010). Rubrics in these studies enabled researchers to draw conclusions about the quality of a wide range of students' information literacy skills.…”

Playing as Argument Architects: Bridging a Learning Gap in the Research Process

“…In addition, prior to our roll-out of Argument Architect at Penn State Berks, campus librarians had recently completed an assessment of the information literacy skills of English 15 students, finding that students struggled with integrating sources into their papers (Chisholm & Spencer, 2019). In particular, students seemed to choose final thesis statements from their own thoughts and then find sources, credible or otherwise, that directly supported or reiterated their thesis, without concern for how they added value to the larger argument.…”