Annotated Bibliography

Harada, Violet H., and Joan M. Yoshina. Assessing for Learning: Librarians and Teachers as Partners, 2nd edition. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010.

This excellent book provides a comprehensive and practical guide to the library media specialist's role in assessment within the context of effective student learning. The book is replete with explanations, examples, and implementation tips for a broad range of assessment tools and strategies, including checklists, rubrics, logs, exit passes, graphic organizers, and portfolios. Additional chapters offer a deep dive, complete with scenarios, into assessing for critical understanding, dispositions, and tech-integrated learning. The final chapters of the book offer examples for implementation of assessment at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels and steps for communicating evidence of learning to different stakeholders.

New York City School Library System. "Empire State Information Fluency Continuum." EngageNY. 2014. https://www.engageny.org/resource/empire-state-information-fluency-continuum.

The "Empire State Information Fluency Continuum" is a comprehensive K-12 continuum of information fluency skills, defined broadly to include the skills of literacy, inquiry, technology, and digital citizenship. Developed by school librarians in New York City, the continuum is provided as a statewide model by the New York State Education Department. The skills are organized under three standards: Using Inquiry to Build Understanding and Create New Knowledge; Pursuing Personal and Aesthetic Growth; and Demonstrating Social Responsibility. Priority skills are identified for grade-level bands and for individual grade levels. In addition, template graphic organizers are offered for priority skills at every grade level.

Regier, Natalie. Book Two: 60 Formative Assessment Strategies. Regier Educational Resources, 2012.

Written by a former teacher and school administrator, this practical handbook provides descriptions and implementation instructions for sixty formative assessment strategies. This document offers enough description that school librarians will be able to decide which strategies are most appropriately integrated into specific instructional situations. The strategies are varied enough that librarians can use them to assess and provoke students' critical and creative thinking, contribution to class discussions, progress in development of understanding, and self-reflection. Any teacher or school librarian will find this handbook to be invaluable for implementing formative assessment.

Stefl-Mabry, Joette. "Documenting Evidence of Practice: The Power of Formative Assessment." Knowledge Quest 46, no. 3 (2018): 50-57.

This article places formative assessment firmly in the context of evidence-based practice. The author provides definitions of terms that are most often used in assessment (for example, learning outcomes, core capabilities, evaluation, and assessment) as well as a valuable overview of how assessment aligns with the Shared Foundations of the 2017 AASL National School Library Standards. Using a specific example of a lesson in which students will create PSAs, the author shows how to define learning outcomes and core capabilities and then how to develop formative assessments to gather evidence of student understanding throughout the process of learning. Finally, the author presents the importance of using evidence from formative assessment to document the effectiveness of the library program.

Stripling, Barbara K. "Empowering Students to Inquire in a Digital Environment." In School Librarianship: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Susan W. Alman, 51-64. NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

This book chapter focuses on the digital environment and the promise it offers our students to connect with and explore the world. The chapter presents the Stripling Model of Inquiry and offers reasons why inquiry-based learning enables students to engage in self-directed discovery and deep learning. The chapter explores characteristics of the digital environment and outlines how learners must adapt their skills and strategies to conduct inquiry successfully in that environment.

Stripling, Barbara K. "Building Trust and Empowerment through Assessment." School Library Connection 1, no. 7 (2016): 6-8.

This article explores the essential element of trust between librarians and students that is strengthened through assessment. When assessment is made integral to the learning experience, librarians build trust that students will acquire the skills, knowledge, and attitudes they need and, at the same time, students develop trust that the librarian will teach necessary skills, provide feedback, and empower them to be successful. The article answers the questions about why librarians assess, what they assess, how they assess, and how librarians can use assessment data to tell the story of the library.

Stripling, Barbara. "Inquiry in the Digital Age." In Inquiry and the Common Core: Librarians and Teachers Designing Teaching for Learning, edited by Violet H. Harada and Sharon Coatney, 93-105. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014.

This book chapter grounds learning in constructivism, in which learners are responsible for constructing their own understanding through the authentic, active, and thoughtful process of inquiry. The nature of the digital environment poses special challenges for students as they try to find credible, connected, and comprehensive information from multiple perspectives. This chapter explores the skills at each phase of the Stripling Model of Inquiry that are important for conducting investigations in the digital environment. Skills that are identified and described include contextualization, maintaining focus, developing higher-level questions, constructing search strategies, evaluating digital sources and information, synthesizing large amounts of specific bits of information and ideas, and using authentic modes of communication.

Todd, Ross J. "Evidence-Based Practice and School Libraries: Interconnections of Evidence, Advocacy, & Actions." Knowledge Quest 43, no. 3 (2015): 8-15.

Assessment is the cornerstone of building library programs based on evidence. This article explains three aspects of evidence-based practice: evidence for practice that uses evidence provided by researchers; evidence in practice that stems from assessment evidence collected by librarians as they practice; and evidence of practice that is used by librarians to validate the impact of the library program on students' learning. The author, a noted researcher in school library issues, emphasizes the importance of librarians' collecting local evidence to present powerful advocacy messages and become agents of transformative change in their schools.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman. "Evolving with Evidence: Leveraging New Tools for EBP." Knowledge Quest 43, no. 3 (2015): 36-43.

This article provides a context for evidence-based practice based on insights that the author gained by conducting focus group discussions with her graduating students about their high school learning experiences. The author identifies and describes 24 tools and websites that enable librarians to gather, analyze, and strengthen student learning, including technology tools to gauge students' ongoing progress, conduct in-depth surveys, examine student work, examine students' reading experiences, capture photos of students learning in the library, and display and share evidence of practice on social media platforms.