The Library has adopted the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, as well as the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Information Literacy Rubric as a framework for designing its own information literacy rubric (see above) and instruction program. These documents help to ground goals and learning objectives for the College, programs, and individual classes within national standards, and provide a touchstone to refer back to when designing instruction.
At the broadest level, the Library’s information literacy goals for students are:
1. Identify information need
2. Access information
3. Evaluate information
4. Use information to accomplish a specific purpose
5. Understand and apply information ethics
These goals have been broken down into learning objectives through the ACRL Framework, and further broken down by the Loras College librarians into specific skills each Loras student should acquire over the course of their college career. The librarians then mapped these skills against the ACRL Framework, and assigned each skill to a specific first-year course, or upper-level courses in general in a tiered model. In the spring of 2014, each program mapped these upper level information literacy skills to their curriculum, and the results were collated to see trends across the College. For more information on this project, please contact one of the librarians.
