Assessing information literacy in engineering: Integrating a college-wide program with ABET-driven assessment

Abstract

As part of a college-wide effort, the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College developed a curriculum-integrated information literacy plan, and adopted information literacy criteria drawn from ACRL standards and faculty input. A review of the plan with an eye to assessment as well as a revision of our ABET outcomes criteria and assessment plan led us to a second round of information literacy criteria development. We sought to integrate the information literacy assessment plan with the overall ABET assessment plan for engineering. This process enabled us to streamline our criteria and facilitated the development of a realistic and rigorous assessment plan. ABET outcomes criteria do not explicitly mention information literacy, but it is apparent that students cannot achieve many of the ABET outcomes without developing information literacy skills. Still, it is not common for these skills to be assessed as part of ABET outcomes assessment. Several mappings of information literacy criteria to ABET outcomes are available in previous work, connecting with several outcomes including lifelong learning, communication, and ethics. Because each institution develops their own set of outcomes, we did not simply adopt another's mapping but developed our own based on our understandings of our outcomes criteria. This paper describes our process in developing our information literacy criteria integrated with ABET standards and our ABET assessment process. We also share the emergent assessment criteria, expected measures of achievement based in student work, and our assessment plan which utilizes electronic portfolios, reviewed by a team that includes librarians and others skilled in assessing information literacy. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.