Infusion of Information Literacy

Friendly URL: http://shortlinks.oswego.edu/infusioninfolit

These pages were first created to support assessment at the capstone level as a part of a departmental self-study. If you are writing an infusion plan for Oswego's new General Education program you will want to use the Librarians' Brief Guide to GE21 Infusion Plans.

From SUNY Oswego's Implementation of the Information Manangement General Education Requirement (Approved by Faculty Assembly, February 14, 2005)

I. Redefinition of the General Education Category of "Computer Literacy" to "Computer and Information Literacy."

. . .

E. Majors may request programmatic exemption/infusion of the new category "Computer and Information Literacy" by demonstrating that they meet all three BOT Information Management learning outcomes at a baseline level through other means.

II. Strengthen Advanced-Level Information Literacy

A. The infusion of advanced-level Information Literacy shall be a General Education requirement for all majors.

1. Departments/Programs shall demonstrate that they embed Learning Outcome #2 - understand and use basic research techniques and Learning Outcome #3 - locate, evaluate and synthesize information from a variety of sources, at the advanced level.

a. Penfield Library staff will work with departments who seek assistance in embedding advanced-level information literacy.

2. Departments/Programs shall prepare majors for formative assessment of Information Literacy at the advanced level.

The strategy of the Library Faculty for implementing these requirements is to use assessment to improve learning. We must resist the temptation to redesign the information literacy components of programs until we have the assessments in hand to guide and motivate changes. And we should never assume that the improvements will include a librarian standing in front of a classroom.

Assessment First

• State the information literacy learning outcomes/goals for students in the major.
  • What would it look like for a student to be proficient in scholarship, reading and writing in the field?
  • Identify and agree on the most important learning outcome or the one that is most important to assess.
  • Use Penfield's Matrix of Information Literacy Learning Outcomes and the General Education Learning Outcomes as starting points. Your Subject Liaison Librarian has already done a librarian-view adaptation of the Matrix for your program. These are available in the Information Literacy Center in ANGEL.
• Identify the learning activity that best affords a demonstration of that learning outcome.
  • Redesign or tweak the activity only if needed.
• Develop a rubric or other means of assessing that learning outcome and do the assessment.
• Share the assessment results with the librarians and pursue improvements or changes in the program and in the assessment.