The Prescriptive Nature of ACRL Standards

To understand how ACRL information literacy standards enhance student learning across the curriculum, it is helpful to identify and discuss its components. There are three basic components—the standards themselves, performance indicators, and student learning outcomes. To adequately implement the standards, it is important to once again acknowledge a distinction, specifically that distinction between the technically correct definition of “standard” and the definition of “standard” as it is applied by the ACRL. In lieu of a rating scale or grade corresponding to a specific criterion or set of criteria as is the typical reference for standards-based assessment, ACRL information literacy standards create a theoretical construct from which to evaluate critical thinking and information literacy skills. Correlating these skills to the various components of the research process, teachers and students are provided with a model for academic success. Pedagogically and organizationally structured to promote the development of reflective learning practices, ACRL performance indicators and student learning outcomes encourage students to become “conscious of the explicit actions required for gathering, analyzing, and using information” that in turn enables them to control “how they interact with information in their environment”(Association of College and Research Libraries & American Library Association, 2000). These skills are commonplace in the first-year composition course.

If ACRL standards articulate the theoretical constructs or foundational precepts for information literacy, the performance indicators delineate benchmarks for measuring proficiency. Designed to be embedded and co-exist within college and university curriculum, the assessment measures monitor student performance in the application of information literacy skills. Performance indicators can be thought of as the cohesive link connecting the standards and learning outcomes. With the performance indicators identifying the benchmarks, learning outcomes specify the intended results of information literacy instruction—expanding one’s knowledge base, improving research skills and internalizing learning dispositions. Unfortunately, this prescriptive tenor oftentimes can result in creating a predisposition among faculty to view efforts in implementing information literacy standards as compromising academic freedom and dictating curriculum.

From this librarian’s perspective and the perspectives of many other librarians, program curricula tends to primarily emphasize subject content with little or no direct instruction devoted to ancillary skills that contribute to the overall academic development and achievement of students as they matriculate. This dissonance between subject and information literacy instruction often manifests itself in the failure of faculty to acknowledge the pivotal role of developmental learning skills—such as information literacy—in ensuring academic success beyond the confines of a single course or program. However, including research skills as part of course curriculum is often a notion relegated to those responsible for First Year Experience programs, remedial instruction, student tutoring services or, in most cases, first-year composition. In other scenarios, especially those beyond the first year of college, faculty typically albeit erroneously ascribe to the assumption college students have mastered the appropriate research skills (Gordon, 2002; Hull & Taylor, 2003; Donham, 2003; Islam & Murno, 2006). Therefore, the conundrum facing most academic librarians is how to integrate information literacy skills into the curriculum without infringing upon academic freedom or preempting subject content while still addressing not only the need to provide for but also scaffold information literacy instruction.

Many faculty members who acknowledge the significance and importance of information literacy skills are paradoxically reluctant to relinquish limited classroom instruction time to incorporate these skills into their curriculum. However, by examining the standards and guidelines for student achievement developed by the various professional organizations—in our case the WPA and ACRL—the parties participating in the collaboration can identify areas of instruction where information literacy and subject content intersect or converge. This exercise, in effect, allows information literacy to emerge as core subject content within a context amenable to both teaching faculty and librarians. Succinctly stated, correlating or triangulating standards helps to promote successful delivery of information literacy instruction among all interested parties. Ironically, the point at which faculty members seem to be the most receptive to collaborating with librarians in the development and delivery of information literacy instruction is when experiencing frustration in teaching library research, a phenomenon occurring with increasing frequency given the advances in and application of new technologies.