The latest NTEU Advocate (p.6) has a report from the EI Higher Education and Research Conference in Malaga. The Advocate article reports on “propsals from the OECD for the introduction of a new instrument for higher education which measures ‘graduate attributes’”. I’ve had a look around and found the relevant conference paper and initial OECD proposal. This is apparently part of the OECD’s Thematic Review of Tertiary Education and will be based on the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which currently looks at 15 year olds. There is also a discussion of the idea (including problems) in an article from last year’s Inside Higher Ed.
All this is of some interest not only to academics but also to libraries because there have long been discussions within the library world on the development of an instrument to measure information literacy. We’ve always seen information literacy as a key area where the Library can contribute to the schools producing graduates meeting key atrributes.
Information literacy is important to lifelong learning in the way it involves skills and knowledge students use to negotiate their way from an information need to searching, accessing, managing and creating new information, while along the way being able to identify and utilise the array of resources now available to them. Some kind of instrument to measure graduate attributes would perhaps allow us to guage the effectiveness of our efforts.
