InfoGuides: Student Learning Assessment Toolkit: Outcome 5

SLAP Outcome 5

Students will be able to critically engage with their own identities, biases, and ideas in order to contribute to the scholarly conversation. (Information Creation as Process / Scholarship as Conversation)

Some skills that teach to this outcome:

How institutional collections are built
Recognizing the need to find multiple sources with different pieces of their topic
Information Cycle
Identifying the scholarly conversation
Audit their own bibliography to determine what source they need and how they fit together
BEAM
Understand how sources fit together to make an argument

Ideas for Assessment: Activity 1

Activity 1:

Citation Mining activity where students are given a scholarly article and asked to find a few backward citations and one forward citation. Students will be given a worksheet that asks them to find the oldest citation from the provided article, look for journals that are cited more than once, any authors cited more than once. Have students choose one citation to find in the databases and compare it to the original source and look at the relationship between the two sources. Finally, have students use forward citation mining to find one source that cites the original article that was provided and compare the two sources.

Skills:

How institutional collections are built
Recognizing the need to find multiple sources with different pieces of their topic
Information Cycle
Identifying the scholarly conversation
Understand how sources fit together to make an argument

Assessment: Reflection Paper (based on one minute paper)

Students will write a short reflection about the activity with guiding questions.

After this activity what do you find to be important about citations for scholarly use?
What did you learn about how scholarly conversation works?
How could you apply what you learned today to your own research?

Criteria	0	1 (Poor)	2 (Acceptable)	3 (Good)	Score
Importance of Citations	None	Students offers brief response	Student offers a well-defined response	Clear, accurate explanation of citation use
Scholarly Conversation	None	Student offers brief response	Student offers a well-defined response	Clear, accurate explanation of the scholarly conversation
How would they apply	None	Student offers brief response	Student offers a well-defined response	Student outlines a clear way they would use citations or scholarly conversation in their own research
				Total

Ideas for Assessment: Activity 2

Activity 2:

Activity where students must seek out at least one source with a different viewpoint than their own/the majority of scholars. Students will use a worksheet that asks them to submit the following:

Their research topic
The majority viewpoint / their own viewpoint (dependent on context)
Dissenting/different viewpoint(s)
Source they found with the different viewpoint
What they learned and how it did or didn’t change their view

Skills:

How institutional collections are built
Recognizing the need to find multiple sources with different pieces of their topic
Audit their own bibliography to determine what source they need and how they fit together

Rubric:

After the activity is finished, collect the worksheets and evaluate them on the rubric below:

Criteria	Checkmark	Comments
Completing the worksheet	Worksheet is fully filled out.
Reflection	Reflection is at least 3 sentences and fully addresses what they learned and its effect on their view.
Sources/Viewpoints	Majority and dissenting viewpoints are included (with citations) and accurately explained.