Many people made this book possible, and I couldn’t have conceived of this project without their help, advice, and guidance at many points during the writing process. First, I would like to thank Todd Gilman for seeing something in my work that I didn’t necessarily see myself and for making its dissemination to a wider audience possible. My editor, Charles Harmon, also saw merit in...

Driven by state and federal guidelines, accrediting agencies, and consumer demand, assessment of student learning outcomes and objectives is a significant ongoing topic in higher education. For academic librarians who provide information literacy instruction, creating and implementing authentic assessment instruments, which require students to analyze, synthesize, and apply what they have learned,...

What are we talking about when we talk about “authentic” assessment? Assessment in all its many forms is a topic that academic librarians discuss and debate endlessly across a variety of contexts. We ask ourselves what we need to measure and then try to determine how to measure it. We also ask ourselves whether or not what we’re measuring actually tells us anything useful. For...

As we have seen, the concept of authentic assessment in a variety of forms has been around for almost thirty years, though higher education has been somewhat slower to implement it than primary and secondary education. In academic libraries, the conversation about authentic assessment has increasingly progressed over the past ten years, moving from discussions of the advantages and disadvantages...

While librarians use an array of both formative and summative authentic assessment techniques within information literacy instruction, these methods can vary fairly widely based on the instructional setting in which they are employed. The selection of an appropriate assessment instrument depends on the nature of that setting, including duration, number of sessions, and much more. In addition, each...

Once librarians have evaluated a variety of authentic assessment instruments and selected a technique that seems to work best within their instructional and institutional context, it can be challenging to determine the best way to implement their chosen methods. Thus, it can be helpful to gain an understanding of how each formative and summative assessment instrument has been used across...

Authentic assessment requires instruction librarians to align their teaching with the assessment instruments since authentic assessment is as much about learning as it is about assessment. Employing common assessment instruments such as traditional multiple-choice quizzes requires only that instruction librarians convey information to students who then demonstrate, at least in the short term,...

As we have seen, authentic teaching and assessment are available to librarians working across a number of information literacy settings, from credit-bearing courses to one-shot instruction sessions. In addition, many, if not most, techniques can be adapted to each library’s needs. This chapter will provide basic guidelines for adapting authentic assessment techniques to the most common...

While authentic assessment for information literacy instruction is still a fairly new concept, the seeds of its future can be discerned in the literature on authentic assessment across educational contexts. From the assessment of the need for early intervention in toddlers to the increasingly complex assessment data reported out to higher education funding agencies and other important...

Authentic assessment in primary, secondary, and higher education, in the discipline-specific and library classroom, has been discussed, debated, implemented, and argued for many years. Educators continue to grapple with questions such as: Why do we have to “assess?” What does it mean to assess? What are we trying to assess? Can we compare assessments from one year to the next? What...

Jennifer S. Ferguson is the team lead, arts and humanities, at the Tisch Library of Tufts University, providing innovative and proactive library service in the areas of research, teaching, and learning to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Jennifer has published on topics that include education for librarianship, discovery layer usability, and streaming video in academic...