Assessing Information Literacy In Engineering: Integrating A College Wide Program With Abet Driven Assessment

As part of a college-wide effort, the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College developed a curriculum-integrated information literacy plan, and adopted information literacy criteria drawn from ACRL standards and faculty input. A review of the plan with an eye to assessment as well as a revision of our ABET outcomes criteria and assessment plan led us to a second round of information literacy criteria development. We sought to integrate the information literacy assessment plan with the overall ABET assessment plan for engineering. This process enabled us to streamline our criteria and facilitated the development of a realistic and rigorous assessment plan. ABET outcomes criteria do not explicitly mention information literacy, but it is apparent that students cannot achieve many of the ABET outcomes without developing information literacy skills. Still, it is not common for these skills to be assessed as part of ABET outcomes assessment. Several mappings of information literacy criteria to ABET outcomes are available in previous work, connecting with several outcomes including lifelong learning, communication, and ethics. Because each institution develops their own set of outcomes, we did not simply adopt another's mapping but developed our own based on our understandings of our outcomes criteria. This paper describes our process in developing our information literacy criteria integrated with ABET standards and our ABET assessment process. We also share the emergent assessment criteria, expected measures of achievement based in student work, and our assessment plan which utilizes electronic portfolios, reviewed by a team that includes librarians and others skilled in assessing information literacy. Introduction and Background Since the 1980s, there has been a growing recognition both of the importance of information competencies, and of the struggle students have in achieving them 1-3 .The development of information literacy standards by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)-and their endorsement by the American Association for Higher Education and the Council of Independent Colleges-has spurred efforts to create curriculum-integrated approaches to information literacy 4. As recognition of the importance of information literacy instruction in higher education continues to grow, and as regional accreditation bodies require assessment of information literacy, many campuses are developing plans for addressing information competencies of students 5 .