28. How TRAILS has been used to integrate information literacy
29. Users Report “I am an Illinois high school media specialist and have been using TRAILS with my ninth grade students. Thank you for your work. TRAILS provides an objective evaluation of information skills that would otherwise be difficult to achieve by sole practitioners.” [Illinois] “I have been using a couple of the #2 assessments with Seniors taking a Research Paper class. They have been extremely helpful to reinforce specific information literacy skills for which they have received instruction.” [Minnesota] “We are using Trails 9 to gather baseline assessments . I'm setting up logins by grade level but we are not tracking each student by name. Our goal is to find out where our students currently stand with competencies.” [New York]
Funding for TRAILS was initially provided through ilile and IMLS. Grade 3 and 12 test development was provided through both a Jennings Foundation Grant and Library Services Technology Act Grant.
Outcomes for this session include
Partnership for 21 st Century Skills information literacy definition
Funded by LSTA and Jennings foundation TRAILS was developed specifically as a tool to be used for assessing information literacy competencies of students, originally at the high school level, and assessments addressing the 6 th grade Ohio Standards were added in January of this year. The tool is based on standards (Ohio first and Informatin Power, now includes AASL Standards for 21 st Century Learning), it’s available on the web at no cost to users, easy and quick to administer and get results, insure privacy of student test-takers b/c we don’t collect any identifying information, results reported by class and by student.
Grouped standards into 5 broader categories this was done by asking content experts to sort standards into groups; looked at agreement among experts after objectives were written and items were drafted, categories were reexamined this was an iterative process
Before getting to the business of writing items, competencies were prioritized Then objectives were developed to match the competencies Finally, items were drafted and reviewed and rewritten to address each of the objectives After a number of internal reviews and revisions, items are field tested by students in the target population T-9 field testing was done by a small number of LMS in Ohio (this was when we were first starting out and we really had to call in favors to get assistance) We have had people all over the country contact us about being involved in field testing for T-6! (Much has changed since the project began.)
The two tests are parallel – pre-post test
Those of you who have been using TRAILS know about the various assessments available. We started out with 2 general assessments, which were considerably revised before the 2006 school year. Shorter category assessments were added before 2006-07 school year TRAILS began as a 9 th grade tool, but was expanded in 2008 to address the 6 th grade level. For T-6 we put together 2 general assessments; live in January so we don’t have a lot of information about their use yet
This is the homepage for the TRAILS site. Note the address is trails-9 – but we have tests for grades 6 & 9. Coming soon we will have tests for 3, 6, and 9.
The registration form collects very little personal information. After registering, you must go to your email account and authenticate from a link sent in your email. If you do not get an authentication email, use the Contact Us form to alert the TRAILS team. They will assist you.
This is what the view assessment screen looks like --
It is suggested that your review the various tests before creating a session. Also decide if you are going to collect data for one class or for the entire school. If you are collecting the data for the whole school and want to analyze the school, then you will need to generate a large number of students. If you are going to create separate sessions for each class you will need to have a naming configuration to help keep the grades/years/etc. straight. The TRAILS tests are not discarded. This is so that benchmarks can be established.
Note that the student codes have several options including copying from a closed session. Many use this feature to do pre and post testing. Assign a student a code – have that student use the same code for both the pre and post test – then it is easy to correlate the test results by student.
Before administering the TRAILS assessment, you can review the assessment. After students have completed the assessment and you have closed the session, the students can review the session with you or independently. To review the session with students, have them go to www.trails-9.org/session/36513 and sign in using their original student codes. Students will see the assessment items in the same order as you see them below. Their original responses will show in their individual views, and the correct responses will show in red. NOTE: The session status must be set to "CLOSED" for this to function for the students.
Student codes can be downloaded as a csv file and then manipulated in an Excel spreadsheet.
CSV file exports and automatically converts to Excel. You can add student names next to the codes. This allows you to keep track of how each student did on the assessment.
This is what the student code sheet looks like. You can write in the student name. Cut the student codes apart. Then each student will have their own unique test. You can post the session url on your website so that students can just click the url to begin their assessment. TRAILS Administration DETAILS Session Name: Sample Session URL: www.trails-9.org/session/36513 To administer a session to your students, give them the Session URL shown in the upper right-hand corner. Students will enter that URL in their browser to access their TRAILS session. If you have requested individual student codes for your students to track their personal performance, you will need to assign each student one of the unique codes that will appear below. You will need to keep a record of what students were given what codes, as TRAILS does not keep track of this information. When connected to TRAILS, a student will enter his/her individual code. If trouble occurs due to network failure, Internet traffic, or any other problem that might prevent a student from completing the assessment, the session can be restarted using the same process and student code. All of the student's previous responses will be present and the student can resume the assessment from the point he or she last attempted to respond. [TIP for using student codes: Print this page. Write student names on the lines provided, and then photocopy the pages. Keep the original for reference and cut apart the copy to hand out to students].
This is a class report.
This is a student report – shows individual student scores.
When you download the CSV file it will look like this. You can sort the CSV file with the student names – and the CSV file with the data. Then copy the names into the file with the data.
Once you have the data in an excel spread sheet you can create graphs to demonstrate how the student are doing as a whole or how one individual student is standing up to the rest of his or her classmates. In this sample the graph is demonstrating the particular class compared to the Ohio 9 th grade benchmarks and the US benchmarks. There are benchmarks for 9 th grade only since to create benchmarks you need data over a lengthy period of time. It is the goal to have benchmarks for each grade in the future. That will be several years from now.
This is what students see when they use a student response system.
This rubric was created by Trumbull County Career Center. The focus is on evaulation of websites. It was developed after teachers reviewed the results of the TRAILS test which demonstrated that the students were having trouble evaluating information sources.
Benchmark data is available for 9 th grade. 6 th grade benchmarks will be posted one we have enough TRAILS 6 users to establish a benchmark for sixth grade.
Funding for TRAILS was initially provided through ilile and IMLS. Grade 3 and 12 test development was provided through both a Jennings Foundation Grant and Library Services Technology Act Grant.