IL Catches the Wave

November 10th, 2005 Stewart Posted in Uncategorized |

Barbara Fister posts to ACRLog (although the URL is acrlBLOG.org — argh! Pick one, guys!) regarding the AACU report on liberal education outcomes. The outcomes listed in the report include “information literacy.”

And that’s great, no question, and I think instructional librarians can use this report as ammunition against immobile faculty, department chairs and deans who do not recognize the need for a strong information literacy component to their curricula.

That said, the report itself is pretty disappointing — thin on details, it almost gives the impression that information literacy and computer literacy are interchangable concepts. Under the information literacy heading, the report details general faculty response to two questions:

Percent of faculty reporting their institutions encourage students to use computers in their academic work
* “Very much” or “Quite a bit” – 91%

How much emphasis do you place on making judgments about the value of information, arguments, or methods such as examining how others gathered and interpreted data and assessing the soundness of conclusions?
* “Very much” or “Quite a bit” – 73%

Notice that only the second question really touches on what librarians consider to be “information literacy.” The other major weakness of the report is, perhaps, more a weakness of our own: a lack of nationwide statistics assessing information literacy successes from standardized testing. The emphasis is on admissions exams (SAT, ACT, etc.) where IL is starting to gain a foothold.

Personally, I would like to see ACRL libraries develop a central registry for scoring of the IL tests we develop. The UB Libraries produce such a standardized IL test, but the scores are not published as far as I know, and are not submitted to any kind of national registry, to be sure. Having access to this raw data could be very useful, especially if assigned to student demographics, including class, major, age, and any other axis that might provide insight into general success/failure of IL training among more specific user populations.