4. Developing Assignment Instructions
Criteria for Success & Assessment Tools
The criteria for success is the list of attributes a successful project will demonstrate. Such criteria are important for clarifying the expectations for the assessment and helping students focus their efforts. When used to facilitate learning, effective assessment tools help students “mind the gap” between desired proficiency levels and student performance (Lipnevich et al., 2014).
Common ways to provide the criteria for success include:
- a rubric
- a checklist
- a variety of exemplars (i.e., previous student work)
- a combination of two or more of the above
The challenge with assessing information literacy practices or concepts in the final output is obtaining evidence. Research assignments that only assess the end product or performance are less useful for evaluating information literacy, which is primarily concerned with knowledge practices and dispositions demonstrated during the process of developing the end product or performance. Chunking your assignments, creating mini assignments, or requiring a research log that enables students to showcase the process and strategies they used to produce the final product can enable you to better assess research and information literacy competencies.
Strategies for Success
For checklists and rubrics:
- Ensure the language describing the criteria is clearly defined, easily understood, and framed in a positive way.
- Align the criteria with the purpose, tasks, and learning outcomes of the assessment.
- Avoid using number of sources or type of sources as markers of success. Instead, focus on quality of selected sources and appropriateness to context.
- De-emphasize mechanics of writing and citation, in favour of higher order thinking, research, and writing skills (unless core to course learning outcomes).
- In some cases, providing a checklist or rubric as feedback after a first draft has been written may be helpful in focusing revisions.
For exemplars:
- Provide annotations for each exemplar (either verbally or in writing) indicating the elements of excellence.
- Offer a variety of exemplars with differing strengths/weaknesses.
- In some cases, providing exemplars after a first draft has been written may be helpful in focusing revisions.
Indigenization Strategies: Ensure your criteria includes multiple dimensions of learning. For example, consider using a traditional medicine wheel as a model for assessing students (e.g., Verwood et al., 2011).
Universal Design Strategies: Ensure all students are able to access the criteria for success.
Example Criteria
Finding & Selecting Sources
- Determines the initial scope of the assignment required to meet their information needs (Wilson & Angell, 2017).
- Uses a variety of strategies and search tools to locate relevant articles.
- Uses a variety of criteria to evaluate and select sources based on the information need.
- Sources have a format/creation process that fits the rhetorical context, demonstrating an underlying understanding of the information need (Chisholm & Spencer, 2019).
- Choice of sources demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the indicators of authority within the discipline, across formal, informal, scholarly and non-scholarly sources.
- Sources are appropriate to the topic and contribute to the thesis, argument, or discussion in a meaningful way (Chisholm & Spencer, 2019).
- Choice of sources demonstrates a discerning eye for scholarly and non-scholarly sources (Goodman et al., 2019).
Integrating Sources Ethically
- Exceptional use of information sources, including using summary and paraphrase well and selecting excellent quotations to support arguments (Chisholm & Spencer, 2019).
- Determines the strengths and weaknesses of sources or exactly what a source answers or does not answer (Goodman et al., 2018).
- Establishes the validity and importance of sources to the context (Burns et al., 2023).
- Identifies the contribution that the selected articles make to disciplinary knowledge (Wilson & Angell, 2017).
- Draws reasonable conclusions based on the analysis and interpretation of information (Wilson & Angell, 2017).
- Accurately represents the original authors’ ideas and/or words when citing, demonstrating a close reading of the text.
- Demonstrates respect for the original ideas of others by providing attribution for sources where appropriate.
- Demonstrates an understanding of their own authoritative voice and the responsibilities this entails, including seeking accuracy and reliability, respecting intellectual property, and participating in a community of practice (Wilson & Angell, 2017).
Creating Information Products
- Demonstrates an understanding that choices in the creation process impact the purposes for which the information product will be used and the message it conveys (Wilson & Angell, 2017).
Following a Citation Style
- Demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of source types and publishing information as well as basic concepts of APA citation style by matching in-text citations with reference list entries using the author and date format and providing accurate author, date, title and source information in reference lists.
- Few errors in use of formatting, punctuation, capitalization, order of information, and italics for each reference list entry, even when dealing with problematic/less common source types.
Helpful Resources
- RAILS: Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills[1]
A collection of submitted rubrics for various information literacy tasks. - Bloom’s Taxonomy (University of Waterloo) [PDF][2]
Categorizes useful verbs for describing cognitive skills. Useful for developing rubrics or checklists. - ACRL Framework[3]
Outlines knowledge practices and dispositions for key information literacy concepts. Useful for developing rubrics or checklists. - Transparency In Learning and Teaching Project[4]
Describes strategies for clarifying assignment expectations. Includes examples.
- RAILS: https://railsontrack.info/rubrics ↵
- Bloom's Taxonomy: https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/sites/default/files/uploads/files/cognitive_domain_-_blooms_taxonomy.pdf ↵
- ACRL Framework: https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework ↵
- Transparency in Learning and Teaching Project: https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources ↵
