Essays may be used in several ways to assess information literacy, either as a separate assignment or as part of a prompt for a larger writing assignment. This method requires students to reflect on their research practices and describe them in their own words, using a metacoginitive approach.
An advantage to using an essay to assess information literacy is that it can be incorporated into an existing research assignment. For instance, students can be asked to submit a paragraph on their research practices along with their final paper or project.
As with assessing learning outcomes with any other method, it is advisable to create a rubric with which to score the information literacy essay.
Some examples of how essays may be used to assess information literacy:
- After completing a research assignment, students can be assigned a reflective essay about their research process. This metacognitive method can be effectively used in combination with a rubric to determine students level of competence and depth of understanding in navigating the information gathering and research process. (E.g., see the article by Nutefall in the Examples and Readings tab on this page).
- For an example of a rubric for grading this type of essay see the Evaluation Rubric associated with the Leatherby Libraries' Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize.
- An essay can be assigned on research methods in order to assess particular information literacy knowledge practices. For instance, Daugherty and Carter (1997) asked students to write essays on their research practices both before and then after receiving library instruction to demonstrate the abilities they learned from the instruction session.
- Essays can also be used for students to reflect on their experience and abilities after completing assigned information-seeking tasks. Dempsey and Jagman (2016) describe an assignment in which students were asked to perform certain library tasks--i.e., identify keywords for a topic according to their interests, search the library catalog, locate the physical items, and check them out--and then reflect on their experience in a two-page essay.
Potential program learning outcomes can be gleaned from the Knowledge Practices of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards, which are described in detail on this guide.
