Yes.

For a fuller answer, see “Why are we doing this?”

The term Information Literacy (IL) captures a wide range of dispositions, habits, practices, processes, and skills related to the use and production of information from a wide variety of sources. For the purposes of this assessment, we are focusing only on one narrowly defined practice demonstrable in student texts:

drawing on multiple sources, and then organizing and synthesizing information from those sources to serve a specific purpose.

Information Literacy itself is much broader than that, so this assessment process will examine only one indicator of students’ engagement with IL.

If this is the case, you have two options: develop an IL assignment that will further develop the most important concepts of the course you are teaching, or submit student work that comes the closest to being an IL assignment. FWIL courses assume an information literacy component; after all, it’s the IL in FWIL.

If you choose the first option, we have resources available to help you design an assignment that will harness the power of IL to support your most important learning goals.

• Work with your library liaison.
• Sign up for our August online professional development, by emailing fwil@uvm.edu.
• Check the FWIL website regularly, as materials will continue to become available there. Log in to the password protected section using your netid and password.
• Contact Libby Miles (eamiles@uvm.edu) or Daisy Benson (dbenson@uvm.edu).

That’s fine – there are many ways to assign writing that includes a researched component blending multiple sources. At the foundational level, in fact, smaller assignments that have been scaffolded to practice different IL practices are highly effective teaching tools; sometimes more so the traditional big research papers. Examples include:

• A journalistic profile that blends personal interview with background information gained through previously published texts
• Literature reviews on researchable questions or topics, either as a final project or as an assignment that leads to something else
• Reading responses that place multiple texts in conversation
• Research-based poster presentations
• Problem-based assignments using research to address an issue based on existing evidence

That’s great! First and foremost, the assignment you choose should support your course’s most important concepts. Feel free to send us soundfiles of podcasts, pdfs of Powerpoints, links to Prezis or YouTube videos – whatever researched texts your students are producing for you. We define text broadly, so it need not be a “paper.”

This year, the assessment focus is only on one of the 4 FWIL learning goals: information literacy. In subsequent years, we will turn our attention to each of the others: rhetorical discernment, substantive revision, and critical reading. Please note that you are still expected to teach all four, but that we will cast our professional development gaze on one at a time.

We can help! UVM offers resources to help you design an assignment that will harness the power of IL to support your course’s most important learning goals.

• Work with your library liaison.
• Sign up for our August online professional development, by emailing fwil@uvm.edu.
• Check the FWIL website regularly, as materials will continue to become available there. Log in to the password protected section using your netid and password.
• Contact Libby Miles (eamiles@uvm.edu) or Daisy Benson (dbenson@uvm.edu).

Click here for thorough instructions detailing your four options.

No, you do not. We will not be looking at assignment prompts, nor will we read to see how well the student performed on your assignment. Instead, we will be searching only for textual evidence of multiple appropriate sources that have been organized and synthesized in a way that seems effective for some purpose.

However, we are always looking for great assignment examples to showcase. If you design an assignment prompt or sequence that you think works well, please share it with us! We’ll keep it separate from the assessment process, but will likely use it as an example to help other faculty in the future. Send your curricular work directly to Libby Miles (eamiles@uvm.edu), or to fwil@uvm.edu. We would love to see it!

Please submit work from every student who completes the assignment. Sampling will be done in the FWIL office to ensure proportional representation from each of the three FWIL paths: TAP seminars, English 001, and HCol 085. This is known as stratified sampling, and is a good way to identify patterns and trends without reading every single student paper. Although it is likely that only 2 or 3 pieces will be randomly selected from your class, we need all of them to ensure a truly representative range.

The process will work best if you get us the student work whenever they turn it in, whenever that falls during the semester. In fall, we will ask you when your assignment will be due, and we will follow up to help you with the submission process. So, if you assign something early, send it along. If it is the final project at the end of the semester, get it to us on or just after the due date. If we haven’t received your students’ work by the last day of finals, we will contact you to see if there is a way we can help.

No, you do not. Students are completing work assigned for your course, so this assessment does not place a special burden on them, require additional work, or put them at risk. This is not a research project per se, and falls under the IRB category of Program Evaluation.

That said, you may feel free to tell them that this assignment will be collected as part of a campus-wide assessment project – if you find it is helpful or appropriate to say so in your class.  We have text available upon request.

There is no risk involved for students. FERPA guidelines will be adhered to in the handling of all student work artifacts, both digital and hardcopy. 

After we receive all submissions, we will select a stratified random sample for a group rating in January. Any pieces not selected through the random number generator will be promptly destroyed. The selected pieces will be redacted and prepared for anonymous rating.

There should be no risk involved for you, either. Just as all student information will be redacted, so too will instructor information. Just as we have no interest in figuring out which student wrote which submission, so too we have no interest in figuring out which instructor assigned a given artifact. The goal of programmatic assessment is to look at the whole, as a collective. Individual identity, as nice as it is, is oddly irrelevant in this context because we are looking to see how the collective is doing in aggregate. We are likely to disaggregate to specific FWIL path (TAP, English 001, and HCol) in order to look at the strengths and challenges of each in regards to this outcome.

That said, Dean Falls and department chairs will be copied on an acknowledgement of your participation. By extension, then, they will know if you did not submit any materials if your name is not on the participation list.

We acknowledge that particular classes, especially certain TAP topics, are readily identifiable if a rater happens to know you and what you teach. So, yes, it is possible that a rater will know that a piece of writing was produced in your class. On rating day, participants in the room will be reading many submissions over a period of several hours. Each piece receives a quick read and a score. In other words, we don’t linger over every piece of writing, because we are only looking for very particular features – in this case, the presence of multiple sources that have been organized and synthesized for some purpose. Raters tend to say that although they might recognize a course instructor in the moment, they move on to the next one so quickly that over time that one piece becomes just a small buoy in a sea of writing. Realistically, being recognized as the course instructor shouldn’t mean anything for you. It would be meaningless for any reader to draw conclusions about the quality of your teaching from a single randomly selected student artifact.

More specifically, student work will arrive at the FWIL office and be logged, tracking only which FWIL path it belongs to (TAP, English 001, or HCol). Samples to be rated will be determined by a random number generator, until proportional representation in each path (strata) is reached. Non-selected samples will be destroyed, while selected examples will be redacted.

FWIL faculty will be invited to participate in a day-long “rating day” January 11ths. Food and Professional Development stipend will be involved. We will first discuss the outcome, looking at some sample submissions. As a group, we will “norm” our sense of what constitutes meeting expectations, exceeding expectations, and not meeting expectations (there will be a rubric to aid with this discussion). We then will move on to rating, with each sample being read by 2 raters. At the end of our time together, we will have a free-flowing discussion of what we found, often at a gut level.

Faculty participants from different disciplines have called these sorts of rating days intensely focused, highly productive, and unexpectedly interesting. Imagine sitting side by side with colleagues throughout the university, focusing on student writing, and then having the chance to talk about what you experienced. Many instructors decide on the spot to change the way they are teaching something, based on their experiences during rating day.

After the ratings have been tabulated, the FWIL committee will host a meaning-making session in February or March to take a look at what we found. We will share the data with anyone who participated in rating day, and ask what you see in the results. Recommendations for action and change will grow from that conversation.

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx famously wrote that the point is “to change it.” We are doing assessment, quite literally, with the aim of responsive change. We are asking, collectively, how we’re doing with teaching one aspect of Information Literacy. What we find will inform the kinds of professional development support we design and offer. It will show us if some paths have strengths from which the others can learn, or if some have challenges that need more support. On a more bureaucratic note, results will be included as part of our NEASC reaccreditation to show that UVM is engaged in the assessment of student learning outcomes for continuous improvement. Please note the purposeful insertion “assessment of student learning outcomes for continuous improvement” in a paragraph that begins by quoting Marx; yes, we are doing this in part because we are required to do so by NEASC, but more importantly we are also doing this so that we can make meaningful curricular and pedagogical change.

Assessment of general education student learning outcomes is a requirement for our NEASC re-accreditation. We need to show that the University of Vermont is demonstrably engaged in the assessment of General Education. More importantly, though, the University of Vermont is demonstrably engaged in ongoing cycles of inquiry, analysis, and curricular revision. The ultimate goal is to teach more effectively, all across the university.

Assessment at UVM is a large and highly collaborative enterprise. In one sense, the “we” is all of us, especially those of us who will teach FWIL courses in Fall 2016. In another sense, the “we” is the FWIL committee, who designed this process to be as responsive and inclusive as possible, while insuring that the ultimate goal remains faculty development and student learning (for a current roster, see uvm.edu/fwil/whatever). Most specifically, the “we” is the FWIL office: Director Libby Miles, and Adminstrative Assistant Michelle McGee.

I (Libby) hope before long that you see yourself as part of the “we.” If you have additional questions, please do ask.