Lunch discussion Notes: Learning Outcomes

Here are the notes from one of the lunch discussion groups at our recent Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop.

The topic of this discussion was: Learning Outcomes. Thanks to Emily Keller for moderating this discussion!

• Is there a disconnect between the information literacy standards and developmental outcomes? How do we move beyond so much focus on the lower order skills in Bloom’s taxonomy? We may undermine students’ extant capabilities and experiences by only showing them tools, rather than tapping into the other skills and experiences they bring to the classroom.

• Experiments using homework, or interactive pre-library session worksheets, to prepare students before their first library session in a class. Helps bring students up to a certain level and ensure that they’ve already covered some basics, without taking up more class time. Instructors distribute the non-graded 20-minute homework assignment. Plans to build on this work and add a post-test to measure progress through the quarter.

• Struggle with translating the broader institutional outcomes into information literacy outcomes in the classroom. Examples and questions:

• An English department has learning outcomes for their writing classes. How do they ensure consistency of outcomes when instructors have such discretion to teach in their own way?

• If information literacy outcomes are already in a program’s objectives, what’s the next step? Working with individual instructors? How does the program assess those outcomes?

• Challenging to frame information literacy outcomes when working with professional, vocational, and technical programs.

• Instructors want us to teach so much in a one-shot session. Perhaps we can use learning outcomes as a tool for talking with instructors about their course goals, specific competencies that they’d like to see, where they see problems, and using that as starting point to talk about what’s realistic in a one-shot session. It can also be a way to frame what we have to offer in terms of helping instructors achieve THEIR course goals, rather than trying to get time in a class where the instructor doesn’t want to take more time away from the syllabus. Explaining how we’ve found active learning activities to be far more effective in fostering student learning that they will retain and apply, and that will take X amount of time for Z learning outcome. Learning outcomes create new ways to step into the discussion, instead of approaching library instruction as an add-on.

• What about collaboration, engagement, and group work as learning outcomes in themselves? Not just processes or activities, but as the very learning that you’re trying to foster? In one instance, group activities fostered engagement that the librarian and instructor now pursue that as a goal itself.

• Variety of activities to foster better articulation between community college and upper division information literacy outcomes.

• E-portfolios, integrating info lit objectives into the curriculum which we would then expect to see in summative student products such as portfolios.