Paper Trail: One method of information literacy assessment

Abstract

Assessing students' information literacy skills can be difficult depending on the involvement of the librarian in a course. To overcome this, librarians created an assignment called the Paper Trail, where students wrote a short essay about their research process and reflected on what they would do differently. Through reviewing and grading these papers, librarians determined whether students understood the difference between the library catalog and article databases, evaluated the students' search terms to see if they used effective topic keywords and Boolean operators, and learned more on how the students reflected on their research process.