… the preparedness of your incoming students
Testing your incoming students allows you to determine where you need to focus your information literacy programs. Many programs begin during the students’ first year. Having this information becomes critical to reaching those students early in their higher education experience. Use custom demographic questions to collect additional information about your students and determine if there are certain populations that require special attention.
… the effectiveness of your information literacy programs
By testing your students before and after they have completed your information literacy programs, you can measure the effectiveness of those programs. These quantitative data can be used to determine where your programs are weak, allowing you to concentrate improvements on those portions that need it most. You can use this information to measure the impact of your programs on your students’ information literacy proficiency.
… the benefits of different instructional approaches
Testing allows you to collect quantitative information about different instructional approaches. An easy-to-administer, standardized test means you can assess larger numbers of students for this comparison. This allows you to experiment with several instructional approaches and produce side-by-side measures of the performance of each. Assessment data gives you the confidence to make instructional changes that you know will be effective.
… how your programs compare to other schools’ programs
Use our cross-institutional data to compare the performance of your students with your peer institutions. By comparing your results to the cross-institutional scores, you can determine if your students’ performance is exceptional. Having this comparison gives you insight into your students’ special needs. Cross-institutional scores are provided as overall scores and also by standard demographics.
Next up: Learn more about the Threshold Achievement Test for Information Literacy.