Curriculum mapping for identifying and assessing information literacy teaching in humanities and social sciences libraries

Abstract

Teaching librarians are regularly tasked with assessing their teaching output and aligning their student learning outcomes to frameworks. Whilst this has been explored extensively in libraries where teams of teaching librarians work together, there has been little exploration for how to assess separate teams working towards the same goals. Previous studies have also mapped teaching against widely used frameworks instead of bespoke institutional information literacy (IL) frameworks. This article outlines how a group of faculty and departmental libraries mapped their teaching to a bespoke IL framework for higher education students. Through doing so, it created a shared understanding of the four competencies included in the framework and identified information practices. These practices were then developed into performance indicators for teaching across libraries and a system was devised for scoring the intensity of the teaching. A set of curriculum matrices and heatmaps were used to explore the scope of teaching delivered and to ensure parity across all student groups. Three core matrices are identified to assess if students receive introductory and advanced tuition across all of the IL framework. The study recommends that curriculum mapping starts with a new interpretation of IL frameworks and that mapping exercises consider how data will be presented during the design stage.