Information Literacy Commons^™

Rethinking Information Literacy Assessment: Relevance, Reliability, And Validity Of Constructs And Measures, Melissa Clark

Librarian and Staff Publications

Information literacy assessment has traditionally approached student learning as the acquisition of declarative knowledge, which can be measured with easily-graded true/false and multiple-choice questions. Although such measures may prove highly reliable in test-retest situations, they are not valid measures of knowledge or learning, because they fail to test procedural and conditional knowledge, both of which are essential for students to reach the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. This omission can partially explain the disconnect between scores on tests of information literacy and students’ continued poor performance on research assignments. Furthermore, information literacy assessment has failed to address the social and …