Calling all Faculty! We need your students!

SAILS (Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills)

York University Libraries are participating in Phase III of a North America-wide project called SAILS, (Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills). The ultimate goal of this project is to first assess how well undergraduate students are able to find, evaluate, assimilate and use information to serve their academic needs, and then use that data to determine how universities can develop programs that will hone these skills and prepare our students for successful careers in the information age.

This project has been developed in three phases at Kent State University, in collaboration with the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). It involves the creation of a survey questionnaire for measuring student information research skills. Phase III encompasses refining and finalizing the questions in the survey, and this is where we need your help.

The survey is standardized, easily administered, reliable, and is based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. The SAILS project team at Kent State University estimates that 140 North American institutions will have taken part in the test by spring of 2005, and York University is the sixth Canadian university to participate in this important initiative.* To see a description of the SAILS project, please see http://sails.lms.kent.edu/.

Why have we become involved? The Information Literacy Committee at York University Libraries has decided to become involved at Phase III of SAILS because this will eventually provide a way for faculty and librarians to establish a baseline for the information literacy skills of incoming students, and compare this to the results of a retest after they have received information literacy instruction, and have applied these skills to their projects and papers. We will be able to determine how effectively we have taught the necessary skills of finding, evaluating and using information. This in turn will provide us with guidelines on how we can make our IL program even better by working in closer collaboration with you, the faculty.

Our part is to administer to a minimum of 200 undergraduates, a 35-question anonymous web-based survey to collect reliable data regarding their understanding of using information. This will be sent to Kent University along with some personal data: gender, GPA, major and level of study. All of the responses will be anonymous, and the results will only appear in aggregated form. This project has been approved by the Human Participants Review Sub-committee, and so meets the ethical standards outlined in the SSHRC/NSERC/CIHR Tri-Council Policy Statement Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (August 1998). We ask for your cooperation and participation in this endeavour so that York University Libraries can work cooperatively with you to design and deliver an Information Literacy Program that will set your students up for success in their university careers.

For more information about SAILS, please contact one of the members of the SAILS sub-committee:

• Sophie Bury, Peter F. Bronfman Business Library, sbury@yorku.ca
• Jennifer Dekker, Leslie Frost Library, dekkerj@yorku.ca
• Ilo Maimets, Steacie Science and Engineering Library, ilo@yorku.ca

  * The other Canadian institutions are: University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, Brandon University, University of Manitoba and University of Western Ontario.

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