Information Literacy Rubric Assessment

Information literacy rubric assessment measures how well students find, evaluate, and use information by scoring their authentic work, papers, annotated bibliographies, research projects, against an analytic rubric that names the dimensions of information literacy and describes performance levels for each. Rather than relying on multiple-choice tests of isolated knowledge or on student self-report, it judges what students actually produce. Project RAILS (Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills), led by Megan Oakleaf, investigated how academic librarians can build and apply such rubrics collaboratively, while the Association of American Colleges and Universities' VALUE rubric supplies a widely used analytic framework with dimensions such as determining the extent of information needed, accessing it, evaluating sources critically, and using information ethically. Calibrated raters score the work, and the aggregated scores reveal achievement and instructional gaps.