Assessing your own practice 

It is important to not only develop effective information literacy skills but also to assess how these can impact our own everyday work. Understanding how information literacy development can bring positive benefits to our pedagogies and to our classrooms is a critical step towards embedding this into our wider everyday professional practice.  

One approach to this assessment is to utilise an information literacy framework to measure the range and depth of skills at use in a particular setting. Formal frameworks (such as the Media and Information Literacy Alliance’s model) essentially provide the conceptual tools to break down information literacy practice into its component parts, making it easier to measure and to explain what these mean in everyday practical terms. Frameworks can help establish skill levels, competencies and awareness of information literacy practices in a wide variety of different learning environments and can be useful to both teachers (in understanding information literacy needs) and children and young people (in understanding where they may need assistance). Frameworks are often easy to use and can produce straightforward digestible outputs, uncover existing areas of strength and provide insight into ongoing development opportunities. 

Assessing information literacy skills in our own settings is therefore a crucial step towards developing targeted and sustainable critical thinking skills. Using an established information literacy framework to measure our work is therefore the best way to understand these needs and to embed good practice into our individual approaches to teaching.