The Process of Triangulating Standards and the Attendant Benefits
For various reasons previously discussed, the disconnection between “college-eligible and college ready” must be addressed, but it cannot be done by correlating high school and college level standards, irrespective of whether they are information literacy or subject content standards. Nor can systemic needs for remediation be ignored. Yet in the absence of a viable solution to this problem, librarians and writing composition instructors must design and develop curricula to provide students with the basic research and writing skills to succeed academically. The Knowledge and Skills for University Success (KSUS) does provide insight into possible strategies for traversing the void precipitated by the disparities between students who are “college-eligible” and those who are “college ready.”
From a cursory perusal of the KSUS subject content standards, it is self-evident information literacy skills or skills associated with research and critical thinking are not skills to be separated or distilled from subject core competencies, but are skills inherent to developing mastery within the disciplines. Subsequently, attempts to integrate or embed information literacy skills into curriculum are counterproductive. If information literacy skills are to be successfully acquired by students, the instruction must be delivered at the point where subject content and information literacy skills converge. One means of determining where this point of convergence exists in composition course curriculum is to triangulate ACRL information literacy standards, WPA outcomes, and institutional course competencies.
Not unlike the disconnection between “college-eligible and college-ready,” identifying the points of convergence is not possible by merely superimposing the WPA outcomes and ACRL information literacy standards. Differences in structural organization and divergent points of orientation for the two standards preclude this course of action. It is however possible to determine the connections or linkages between proscriptive curriculum guidelines as articulated in the WPA Outcomes and prescriptive performance indicators and learning outcomes delineated in the ACRL information literacy standards. Acknowledging information literacy skills currently exist as part of the content for composition courses (Wilder, 2005), as opposed to the need to embed or integrate these skills into course curricula, is not a matter of semantics. Such an acknowledgement enables collaborative efforts between faculty and librarians to focus on providing students with an opportunity to concomitantly and concentrically acquire and apply subject content and information literacy skills, a highly effective instructional strategy the majority of faculty and librarians would concede. Once the points of convergence between various professional standards have been identified, it is then possible to add institutionally defined student competencies to the mix. The culminating activity necessary to bring the triangulation effort to fruition is the alignment of all identified points of convergence and the resolution of any ambiguities and/or inconsistencies as a result of the alignment. The final step in the process is to align the triangulation of standards with the course curricula, specifically course student learning outcomes. The next page on the strand, "Triangulation," represents our efforts to collaboratively triangulate standards at MSU, Mankato. As such, it is but one example of how professional and institutional academic standards can be triangulated to identify points of convergence.