What's in a rubric? Meaningful scoring of information literacy instruction

Purpose: Educational assessments help in teaching and learning by identifying students’ acquired concepts and knowledge gaps. An assessment activity does not have to be solely the end-product of a class. It can be part of... [ view full abstract ]

Purpose:

Educational assessments help in teaching and learning by identifying students’ acquired concepts and knowledge gaps. An assessment activity does not have to be solely the end-product of a class. It can be part of the learning process, especially if an authentic scenario is used in the assessment. Authentic assessment of information literacy (IL) instruction evaluates students’ abilities to research their genuine questions using the skills they have been taught. While authentic assessment is beneficial for testing whether students can employ learned concepts to situations outside the classroom, thus also encouraging students’ creative and critical thinking, it is more labour-intensive and challenging to evaluate responses since there is no single correct answer.

Many studies about the assessment of IL instruction have reported the use of specific rubrics, i.e., grading criteria, to evaluate students’ responses. Rubrics can be divided into two general categories: 1) holistic, where one score is assigned for evaluating the successful completion of a task; and 2) analytic, where a grade is subdivided into discrete components needed to complete the task and each component is given its own score for achievement. 

Design, methodology or approach:

This paper will investigate which scoring method (employing holistic versus analytic rubrics) is the most effective for evaluating students’ search strategies in terms of providing constructive feedback to students and informing the librarian’s future teaching practices. These scoring methods were applied to the search strategies of over 100 engineering students who received in-class IL instruction, and were compared using multiple criteria such as the time required to apply each rubric, the reproducibility of results, and the information gleaned from the final grades. 

Findings and Conclusions:

The findings from this study will be useful for teaching librarians seeking to evaluate responses to open-ended assessment questions.