TRAILS: My Assessment of their Assessment!

I visited the following website for my LIBS 676 class:  http://trails-9.org/index.php?page=home

I started my exploration of TRAILS by clicking on a student view of an assessment (6^th grade), and quickly realized my error.  I had no idea what TRAILS was all about or what is was used to assess.  So I started clicking on the links to the left of the website and discovered that the program was created by the Kent State University Libraries to assess students’ informational literacy skills.  I think that this is an often-neglected area of instruction and assessment and is very important for students’ success in all of their content area classes.  If students don’t know how to find accurate and relevant information, how can they write research papers or learn more about topics from class? 

I explored the assessments for the sixth grade and I found them to be very thorough.  The students are assessed on their abilities to develop topics, identify resources, etc.  I don’t think that using TRAILS would be too much testing because the students are completing assessments that are only ten questions long.  The website also gives suggestions on how to “mix it up” by letting the students work in small collaborative groups to complete the assessments or creating a game show setting with a master of ceremonies to go through each question. 

At the time, our current librarian does not use any assessments for documenting students’ knowledge of informational literacy skills.  The language arts department uses their assessment times for documenting student reading levels, so they would probably not want to give additional assessments like the TRAILS.  For that reason, the library would be the perfect place to complete these short assessments.  They could be used to start discussions with the group based on the topic of each assessment.  I would use the TRAILS tests as a diagnostic assessment tool to get a snapshot of students’ levels before beginning a unit or discussion.  A weakness of the assessment could be its length in that it’s difficult to access students’ prior knowledge on only 10 questions.  Personally, I like the short assessment length, but it may be too short to show actual student knowledge. 

I found most of the questions to be written with vocabulary that was on or above grade level.  This might be a problem when using the assessment with my special education students, because they may miss questions because they don’t understand what is actually being asked.  TRAILS could probably be improved by creating differentiated assessments that accurately assess students at different learning levels.  The setup of questions might also be a problem.  Students at my school take online benchmark exams that only show one question on the screen at a time.  The assessments might allow better student focus by creating assessments that go through 10 slides of questions, allowing only one question on the screen at a time.