Measuring student's ability to find and use high quality information: Developing standardized assessments

Students consistently struggle to locate, evaluate and apply high quality information to solve open-ended problems they come across in their engineering courses. Internet search engines identify millions of Web pages that match generic searches, but frequently, the resources they return are superficial and targeted toward selling products, rather than providing useful, relevant information to inform a problem. Additionally, students often take information at face value, rather than attempting to determine the authority or validity of the source. As a result, students compose superficial papers, frequently just summarizing the more or less relevant sources that appear first in a cursory web search. In order to assess student abilities and their work products, the authors developed two assessments of students' abilities to recognize appropriate information sources and their application in a written document. The first instrument is a two-tiered multiple choice/short answer test, CELT (Critical Engineering Literacy Test), which provides a scenario-based engineering-contextualized format for probing students' ability to recognize and explain appropriate search strategies, sources of information, acknowledgement of sources, and application of information to support an argument. The second instrument is a qualitative coding protocol, InfoSEAD, which can be applied to student research projects to determine how well they used appropriate information sources in an appropriate manner, and acknowledged those sources in an ethical manner. Using these tools, instructors can assess student skills and provide specific, targeted instruction and feedback to improve student performance.