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Student assessment, as defined by Jean Donham, involves careful examination based on the
close observation that comes from sitting together (Donham, 2013, p. 299). Her picture of assessment
is sitting beside someone to see what the person is doing. Donham believes that assessment serves four
purposes: to improve student growth; recognize accomplishments; improve instruction; and modify the
program (Donham, 2013, p. 300). Based on this information, school librarians should definitely be
involved with student assessment.
Formative assessment involves checking student understanding of subject matter and skills
while a lesson or unit is in progress, while summative assessments are done at the end of a unit or
lesson to evaluate student learning. Most often, school librarians do not assign grades to students that
will be reported on their report cards. The skills and material taught by the librarian are essential for
students to be successful in their classrooms, and are integrated into the curriculum. It is in the
librarians best interest to collaborate with classroom and subject teachers and to be involved with the
creation of the rubrics for assessment so that information literacy skills may be included on the rubrics.
Upon completion of assignments, if the information literacy items are being scored low on the rubrics,
the teachers need to let the librarians know so that they can find ways to more successfully re-teach
those information literacy skills.
Information literacy skills are woven into all subjects in the Common Core Standards. In order to
know if students are learning the skills and if the information literacy lessons are successful, school
librarians need to assess the students work, regardless if they are grading the work or not. I believe
that students should feel that the library is a safe space where they are free to explore and, at times, fail
in their pursuits. Students might not be willing to take risks and try new technologies or explore new
ways of doing something if their work will be graded and they have a method to create the end-product
that they have used successfully in the past. Ungraded formative assessments provide students
feedback and the chance to revise their work (American Association of School Librarians, 2009, p. 27).

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By informally assessing student progress through questioning, and ungraded assessments,
teacher-librarians can determine whether or not their information literacy lessons are successful, and
make adjustments to their lessons and teaching to improve their instruction. School librarians are not
only concerned with students final products, but also with their processes of seeking, evaluating, and
using information that students practice to arrive at the final product (American Association of School
Librarians., & Association for Educational Communications and Technology, 1998, p. 174). Ongoing
ungraded assessment of student understanding should be built into information literacy skills lessons in
the form of verbal checks for understanding, entrance and exit cards which ask brief questions about
what the students already know about something or what they have learned, and simply observing
students work and providing feedback as the librarian is circulating around the room during a lesson.
Harada and Yoshina co-authored Assessing for Learning, an entire book dedicated to the subject
of teachers and librarians as partners, focusing on formative assessment. In it, they describe the
dynamic model of relationships among curriculum, instruction, and assessment with this visual:

(Harada, 2010, p. 11)

The illustration shows that instruction is not a linear process leading to a student assessment, yet rather
a cyclical process in which instruction can be modified based on ongoing student assessment.
Rubrics should be used to guide the students toward their final products, and to help them with
reflection on their own work through self-assessment. Rubrics are most often presented in chart format
and detail what is expected and acceptable to receive full credit for each component of an assignment.

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Well-written rubrics should allow little room for ambiguity and subjectivity with respect to grading. The
rubric will let students know the expectations, and provide guidance for the teacher in grading.
There are often at least 3 degrees of success on a rubric: a target range in which all of the
elements in the assignment are complete, an acceptable range in which most of the elements are
present, and one which is unacceptable or below expectations. Rubrics may be very simple for
elementary school students and simply have two columns with yes or no for each element, such as
I began all my sentences with a capital letter. Other rubrics may have four or five degrees of
completeness from unsatisfactory to exceeds expectations, or from novice to expert for each
component. In all cases, rubrics should clearly define the criteria for success and the elements to be
included in the final product. Students should be encouraged to refer back to the rubric as a checklist
during their work to help them stay on task and to help ensure success. By self-assessing using the
rubric during the project, students take control of their learning.
Below a rubric that I created in collaboration with a classroom teacher for a 2nd grade lesson in
which students were researching a country and writing informative text which contained sensory
information:

Criteria for Success

Part of My
Informational Text

Does not meet

expectations at all

Partly meets
expectations

Facts about my
country

I do not have any

facts with sensory
details about my
country.
I do not have any
information about
where I found my
facts.

I have one fact

with sensory
details about my
country.
I have some
information about
where I found my
facts, but it is not
in the proper
format.

Citations

Meets
expectations
(This is our goal!)
I have 2 or 3 facts
with sensory
details about my
country.
I have at least one
citation for my
information in the
proper format.

Exceeds
Expectations
I have 4 or more
facts with sensory
details about my
country.
I have more than
one properly
formatted
citation.

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Students used the rubric while completing the assignment as a way to check for completeness.
Student assessment is visible in the lessons I have observed at Maryvale Elementary School:
Often, it is just an informal show of hands when asking a question to check for understanding, or the
teacher or media specialist walking around checking student progress. Sometimes, the media specialist
takes advantage of the learner response system associated with the schools Promethean interactive
white boards the ActiVote eggs to check for understanding. With ActiVote, the media specialist can
ask a multiple choice or true/false question on screen, and the students can answer with the ActiVote
device. This gives the media specialist immediate feedback as to whether the instruction was successful
or not. If not, she can try differentiating instruction and do another check for understanding after
teaching the lesson in another manner.
Another way I have seen formative assessment is through paper worksheets. In one instance,
the subject a first grade lesson was text features of non-fiction books. At the end of the lesson, the
students were given a copy of a page from a book that contained a heading, bold print, and a label. The
students were given a word bank with text feature words, and they had to write the name of the text
feature on the line next to the text feature on the book page. This particular lesson itself was good and
effective; however, I would have changed the format of the response worksheet. The first graders are
still not able to write quickly, and one of the text features on the page was confusing it was not clear
what the line was next to, if it was the picture or a label. I would have used a page from a different book
with no ambiguity whatsoever, and I would have put the word choices next to each of the text features,
put a box around the text feature, and simply had the child draw a line from the correct text feature to
the box.
Often, the assessment of information literacy skills is included in the rubrics created by the
classroom teacher alone or in collaboration with the media specialist. An item on the rubric will directly
relate to a skill such as including citations for their sources, or including a certain number of facts which

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were obtained from library databases. These rubric items do count towards a small portion of the
students overall grade for the assignment, but because the grade is given by the classroom teacher, the
student still feels that the library is a safe, non-judging zone.
Feedback on information literacy skills should be provided to the media specialist by the
classroom or subject teachers. Sometimes the feedback is in the form of a request to teach or re-teach
certain skills to certain students, and other times, to teach a skill that a whole class might be lacking.
Information literacy skills are skills that students will need to be successful not only in their
schoolwork, but in life, and they are embedded into every area of the curriculum. It is important for
school librarians to be involved in assessing the students knowledge and proficiency in these skills to
ensure their future success. I believe that ongoing formative assessments during instruction are the
best way for school librarians to ensure that students are learning the desired information literacy skills,
and to restructure instruction if the lessons are not successful in the manner they are being taught.

Works Cited
American Association of School Librarians. (2009). Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library
Media Programs. Chicago, Illinois: American Association of School Librarians, a division of the
American Library Association.
American Association of School Librarians., & Association for Educational Communications and
Technology. (1998). Information power: Building partnerships for learning. Chicago: American
Library Association.
Donham, J. (2013). Enhancing Teaching and Learning: a Leadership Guide for School Library Media
Specialists (3rd ed.). New York, New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.
Harada, V. H. (2010). Assessing for Learning: Librarians and Teachers as Partners. Santa Barbara, CA:
Libraries Unlimited.