The IL rubric seen from a student’s perspective

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The Scoring Rubric for Information Literacy
In a previous paper ( Van Helvoort 2010) I reported on the development and testing of a scoring rubric for information literacy (IL) and have explained that a scoring rubric can be considered as a set of criteria for rating important dimensions of performance, as well as the standards of attainment for those criteria on different levels (Jonsson and Svingby 2007, p. 113).The full IL rubric is presented in the appendix of the previous paper, here it suffices to say that this rubric establishes performance that is 'professional' (i.e.good) or 'insufficient (i.e.poor).

The students' view of the rubric
The aim of this follow-up article is to describe how adult students of the Department of Information Services and Information Management at The Hague University actually use the scoring rubric for IL for their studies or for activities in their professional lives, such as their regular jobs or voluntary work.For this purpose, a focus group was organised with five part-time undergraduate students who were familiar with the rubric and although the sample is too small to produce findings that can be generalised to all other groups of students, the results appear to be of relevance to the IL community.To facilitate the focus group, a neutral moderator was invited to chair the discussion.The developer of the rubric (who is also the author of this article) attended the meeting as an observer and to take notes.

Benefits and limitations of the rubric
The students who participated in the focus group associated the use of the rubric with a number of benefits.To begin with they used the scoring rubric for self-assessment throughout the course in which it was introduced.The scoring rubric helped them to evaluate their own assessment paper before submission.Four out of the five students reported that they used the rubric's criteria to check the assessments for subsequent courses and of work-related reports, thus showing that the rubric had helped them integrate evaluative competences in their academic work, as well as in their professional practice.The transferability of the rubric from academic to work-related activities was one of the most significant outcomes of this study.
According to all participants in the focus group the rubric has one important limitation: it only describes what the desired levels of information literacy look like, but not how someone could reach these desired levels.This is recognised by the developer of the rubric but a rationale for focusing the rubric on the qualities of the finished student products is presented in the previous paper ( Van Helvoort 2010, p. 25).

Impact for the educational practice
The workshop in which the rubric was used, was run towards the end of the degree (in practice this means that part-time students complete the workshop at the end of the second year of their studies).During the focus group's discussion, the students recommended that the workshop should be introduced earlier in the curriculum to encourage students to monitor their progress in information problem solving at different stages of the degree.Whilst the students' recommendations did not go into details about the changes in terms of timing or the ways the rubric's workshop should be delivered, it is important to note that I will be discussing these comments with colleagues who are involved in the workshop's development and delivery.