Part of my doctoral research in Information Literacy (IL) involves designing tools to measure students’ IL proficiency. Together with my supervisors, I have developed three IL assessment tools and an IL interest tool.
Using these tools, we can measure and analyze the following with regard to IL:
- what students know, do and feel
- how knowing, doing and feeling develop over an undergraduate education
- how relationships between knowing, doing and feeling evolve
Depending on which definition you use, IL may include many different skills. However, three skills that are included in almost all IL frameworks and standards, are information seeking, source evaluation and source use. I therefore chose to concentrate on measuring these three. In addition, we wanted to determine the role of one previously unexplored psychological factor, namely interest, in students’ IL learning.
There is no consensus about how best to measure IL knowledge and skills in students, and many current assessment tools are either expensive or cumbersome to use. My aim is to develop tools that are reliable and valid, free and easy to use/adapt, and suitable to all disciplines, geographical locations, genders, religions, etc.
The result of these efforts is the Tromsø Information Literacy Suite (TROILS), consisting of 4 IL tools to measure what students know, do and feel:
- know: Information Literacy Knowledge Test
- do: Source Evaluation Measure (annotated bibliography) and Source Use Measure (rubric)
- feel: Tromsø Interest Questionnaire (TRIQ)
Feel free to use these tools as you wish, but be sure to cite us if you do! 🙂
If you modify the tools, please keep in mind that:
- your results may not be comparable with our results or that of others who have used the original tools
- the original tools have been evaluated for reliability and validity, and modifications may result in less reliable and valid versions