Assessment of First-Year Composition Students\u27 Information Literacy Skills

One of the ways we have been assessing the information literacy skills of our first year students is through developing and applying rubrics to a sample of annotated bibliography projects from the required English Composition course at UNLV. The annotated bibliography assignment consists of a paper proposal and the annotations for 5 sources the student plans on using in their final research paper. The source evaluation rubric was applied to each individual annotation (totaling 1358 annotations) and the rubric examined the extent to which students were using the evaluative criteria of currency, relevance, and authority when selecting and evaluating an information source. The goal of our assessment project was to learn where students were struggling with evaluating information so that we could revise our library instruction program to better support areas of need. Our examination revealed that the majority of annotations (89%) did not include any evaluation of the currency of the source. Students were more likely to consider authority and relevance when evaluating--26% of the annotations critically applied the evaluative criteria of authority and 35% critically applied the evaluative criteria relevance. However, our assessment made clear that more emphasis on source evaluation was needed both in the library session as well as in the English Composition classroom