After their recent project report, “Reflection as a means to assess information literacy instruction”, published in the December 2025 issue of the Journal of Information Literacy, Natalia Kapacinskas, Veronica Arellano Douglas, Erica Lopez, and Mea Warren share a project report update with us.
Our Teaching & Learning department at the University of Houston Libraries has a strong set of professional values that shape what and how we teach. Experimentation, reflection, and improvement of our teaching and student learning is important to us, and we strive to make sure that these values are present not just in our teaching, but in our assessment practices as well. As with most colleges and universities in the United States, assessment of student learning and success is a priority at our institution. In 2023, we recognized that if we didn’t develop our own value-informed methods of assessment, we would likely have a generic model of assessment imposed on us at some point. Wanting to prevent that, we examined different methods of information literacy student learning assessment in the library and information science literature and through conversations with our colleagues at other academic libraries. What we found was a consistent pattern of proof-of-value assessment, and a recognition that formative assessment was likely going to be the best way for us to learn about student needs.
Additionally, a conversation with our colleague, Joanna Gadsby, Instruction Coordinator and Reference Librarian at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, inspired a focus on reflective practice in assessment as well as teaching. She and her teaching librarian colleagues had worked on a portfolio project in which each librarian focused on a different class for a year and gathered student work, assessment artifacts, lesson plans, activities, and instructor reflections. This, combined with Natalia’s research into librarian-teacher self-efficacy development and Erica’s research on student learning assessment, drew our attention and focus to the power of reflective practice. Through reflective practice, we saw an opportunity to embed our department’s values into our method of assessment. You can read our project report for more details about the Reflective Assessment Toolkit and process we developed, but we wanted to take this opportunity to share an update on the status of the project and how we are moving forward with continued assessment work.
Year 2 Update
We recently wrapped up Year 2 of our Reflection Toolkit with a focus on assessment of student learning. At the beginning of the fall semester, we used Padlet to crowdsource assessment ideas and activities. As we started teaching, we began to recognize several unforeseen challenges, especially related to assessment format. Those of us who used printed worksheets with reflective prompts were surprised at the number of students who wanted to hold on to their handouts. We prefer to allow students to keep worksheets if they find them helpful. However, this meant we did not always get to see as much student work as we had hoped. Librarians who made use of online tools such as Mentimeter and Padlet had access to more student-provided data after class.
We experienced additional trial and error regarding assessment when we realized that our chosen assessment method didn’t always answer the assessment question we had in mind. For one librarian, this led to the valuable outcome of uncovering a great deal of anxiety regarding finding the “right” sources within student responses, which encouraged her to adapt future lessons in ways that led students toward a mindset of finding optimal, rather than correct, sources of information. In other cases, this mismatch between question and assessment method resulted in less useful information, amounting to a lesson in crafting appropriate assessment methods.
Our instruction scheduling relies heavily on faculty requests, and sometimes the “right” opportunity to try a particular assessment method didn’t present itself. Sometimes we would only uncover such an opportunity once we had scheduled a class session and begun planning—often on an abbreviated timeline. The busyness of our schedules once class requests started rolling in contributed to colleagues forgetting about incorporating student reflective assessment in their sessions altogether.
To re-center, we met midyear to focus on using learning outcomes as a foundation for student learning assessment. We reviewed the reflective toolkit and identified learning outcomes we wanted to target for evaluation in the fall semester. This was helpful, but overall, focusing on student learning assessment during Year 2 continued to prove more challenging than focusing on self-efficacy reflective assessment in Year 1.
Next Steps
Now that we have completed a full cycle of our project, we want to assess the assessment process and think about what to implement in the future. Each year, librarians found it difficult to remember exactly what we were assessing and how. Even with our regular check-ins, it was challenging to keep everyone engaged in ways that led to a meaningful wrap-up during our teaching celebration at the end of the year where we shared reflections and ephemera. What can we do to continue making this low effort while still helping our librarians reflect on their self-efficacy and student learning? Librarians thought the reminders encouraged them to be more reflective and spend more time thinking about their own self-efficacy and student learning activities. Thinking more intentionally about whether our assessment is genuinely measuring student mastery of learning objectives helps us to more authentically assess class sessions. Moving forward, we want to see more student work to assess our instruction.
We need to decide how often we’ll carry out this cycle. It is not necessary to implement every year, so maybe we will take a few years off before starting another cycle. Maybe we’ll wait until things feel stale and a desire to reflect more intentionally on our teaching prompts restarting the cycle. Perhaps we will facilitate reflective assessment for librarians who teach outside of our department so that we can have a more cohesive teaching philosophy throughout the libraries.
We also want to share this toolkit and experiences to communicate the value of our work and how we support student success at the university level. Piloting the Reflection Toolkit was a department goal for us in each of the years we completed the cycle, and we celebrated our success as we compiled ephemera at the end of each year and reflected on our year of teaching. Gathering more student feedback, talking about the improvements we’ve made to classes as a result of using the toolkit, and sharing the positive responses to our presentation and article will be valuable to the library and university’s mission of prominence and student success.
