Elisa Burggraf
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     Assessment

     Assessment has always played an important role in education.  However, in this era of accountability and tight budgets, assessment has become even more important and with the shift to inquiry based learning, the importance and necessity of assessment continues to grow.   As the school library is a classroom, assessment plays just as important a role in student learning and effective teaching in the school library as it does in any other classroom.
     Assessment is the process of “collecting, analyzing, and reporting data” (American Association of School Librarians and Association for Educational Communications and Technology, 1998, p. 173).  Assessment can be quantitative or qualitative (Woolls, Weeks, & Coatney, 2014, p. 196) and according to Harada and Yoshina (2010) can be placed in one of three categories: Assessment of Learning, Assessment for Learning, and Assessment for Advocacy.  Assessment should be an integral component of all school library programs.  The data derived from assessments can be used to determine what students have learned and how well students have learned lesson content; it is preferable to have this confirmation rather than just assume students’ understanding.  There are many other benefits to utilizing assessments in the learning process: teachers that utilize assessments are better at communicating learning expectations; assessments motivate students; assessments provide information for advocacy (Harada & Yoshina, 2010, p. 17); assessment provides immediate feedback which allows for improved teaching and greater student learning; assessment allows for differentiated instruction (Harada, 2006).
     Assessment of learning, also known as summative assessment, is an evaluation of student learning and is done at the end of a student learning project or task.  These assessments are judgmental in nature and involve only the instructor.  Any final product that is graded is an example of summative assessment.  School librarians may be involved in formative assessment by evaluating student work in its entirety or just a portion of a student project (such as grading the citation portion of a research project).
     Assessment for learning, also referred to as formative assessment, takes place during teaching, is reflective in nature and involves both the instructor and the student.  Formative assessments include a pre-assessment to identify what students do and do not know about a topic.  The assessment then informs what content should be taught by the instructor.  Furthermore, formative assessments also identify when intervention is needed and what intervention is required (Kuhlthau, 2010).  Methods of formative assessment include: observation, conferences, checklists, rough drafts, graphic organizers, learning logs, and exit passes.  A blog posting by Library Girl, Jennifer LaGarde (2012), lists and describes her personal preferences of digital tools for formative assessment.
     Assessment for advocacy is a “synthesis of evidence focusing on student achievements” (Harada, 2006) and is used to communicate and promote the role of the school library in student academic achievement.  There is national data that can be used for demonstrating the importance of school libraries, but data also needs to be collected on the local level.  A student portfolio or evidence folder showcasing a student’s best work and clearly illustrating progress and improvement in skills is an example of an assessment for advocacy.
     I have observed teaching and collaboration in school libraries, but I have not witnessed any school librarian assessing student work.  As the methods of assessment listed previously indicate, assessments need not be elaborate nor time intensive.  Simple assessment methods can be very effective to determining how well students are learning what is being taught and what content needs to be presented again.  Especially because simple is a viable option for assessment, school librarians should make every effort to incorporate assessment into the school library program.  A middle school librarian I observed could have this, but did not.  This librarian was teaching art students how to find resources for their given artist and how to create the citations for the sources they decided to use.  The students had a handout they were working from.  On this handout, they wrote down the title of the resource they were going to use.  The school librarian and art teacher circulated among the students while they worked, but at the end of the class the students left and took the handout with them.  It would have been very easy to leave the handouts behind and let the school librarian assess the students’ work.  If she had done so, she would have known if they had identified the best sources possible and she also would have known if the students understood how to create citations or if that information needed to be reviewed.  Without an assessment, the school librarian had no definitive way of knowing if those students had the skills they need to meet their information need.
     At another school library I visited, I was there on a day when 9th grade students were participating in Reading Zone.  This is a program based on a book by the same title.  The students come to the library once a week to engage in free reading.  The school library had special book displays (such as Humorous Books, Chick Lit, Read it Before it Becomes a Movie, and such) and even bought beanbags that were brought out only for this program.   The benefits of free voluntary reading are well documented.  This is a great program and the students will benefit, but it could have been better if there was an assessment component to it.  However, there was not; which surprises me now, because the head school librarian is an advocate of evidence-based practices (I saw this in every other aspect of her school library program.)  I think a summative assessment or an elaborate formative assessment would be counter to the spirit of free voluntary reading.  However, something like a genre checklist or a reading log could have been incorporated.  That type of assessment would have let the students see what they had accomplished and would have given the school librarian some data on what students prefer to read.  I think it would also have been interesting to have had students write a brief statement regarding their opinion of reading (if they like it and why, if they don’t like it and why not, what genres do they like to read and what genres do they not care for).  At the end of the year, students would again write a brief statement on their opinion of reading; they could then compare the two statements to see if any change had taken place.
   Assessment should be a meaningful, intentional component of a school library program.    Each type of assessment (assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment for advocacy) serves an important function and can provide data on a wide range of library activities and services.  Formative assessment is particularly crucial as it provides the framework and path for all instruction that takes place in the school library and is also the basis for other types of assessment. Formative assessment allows the school librarian teacher to know for a certainty what students know, how well they know it, and where the gaps in knowledge are that need to be addressed.  As one authority put it, “To be blunt, if school librarians are to call themselves teachers, then they too must ensure that students are learning, not just ‘doing’” (Fontichiaro, 2011).