Sources: Snapshots of Reality: A Practical Guide to Formative Assessment in Library Instruction

Snapshots of Reality: A Practical Guide to Formative Assessment in Library Instruction. By Mary Snyder Broussard, Rachel Hickoff-Cresko, and Jessica Urick Oberlin. Chicago: ACRL, 2014. 256 p. Paper $52 (ISBN: 978-0-8389-8689-9).

Written by two academic librarians and an education professor, this book aims to introduce the concept of formative assessment to a wider library audience and to demonstrate how formative assessment can be used in one-shot library sessions. The authors detail 48 formative assessment snapshot techniques (FASTs) that could be used as part of a library instruction session.

The authors define formative assessment as "small, frequent, and often informal assessments designed to help the educator get an understanding of students' current knowledge and what they have learned" (5). The formative assessment snapshot techniques (FASTs) are broken down into those that could be used before, during, or after an instruction session. The authors also provide the estimated time required for a given FAST, the amount of collaboration required with the course instructor, and the information literacy standard (ACRL or Standards for the 21st-Century Learner) addressed by the assessment. Although the authors focus on how formative assessment is used to improve student learning, they offer a chapter on how it also can be used to improve librarian teaching. The authors devote a chapter to technology tools that can be used in formative assessment, and they end with a discussion of the use of formative assessment in school libraries and a description of a "culture of assessment."

The authors do a good job of detailing the benefits of using formative assessment in one-shot library instruction. In their literature review, they note that librarians may already be using some formative assessment in their instruction sessions. This book provides these librarians with additional tools to expand the assessments they are already doing. Recognizing that adding assessment to their sessions could be challenging for some, the authors offer a number of suggestions for getting started and developing a learning community of fellow librarians. One of the challenges mentioned is that librarians struggle with having limited time in one-shot sessions. The authors helpfully provide the estimated time that would be needed for each of the FASTs. However, this reviewer wondered about how and whether more than one FAST could be used in a session in which some initial instruction and possibly follow-up instruction would need to occur. Although the authors do provide a sample guided implementation template, this reviewer would have appreciated an outline of a sample session, with timings, with the formative assessment(s) to be used. The chapter on technology use for formative assessment is useful in showing the reader how the use of technology could make the assessment process faster.

Although one chapter is dedicated to the use of formative assessment in school libraries, this book would be of most benefit to academic librarians doing face-to-face one-shot instruction sessions. Formative assessment could be a useful tool to demonstrate student learning to the larger university, and this title can help create and improve existing skills.—Qiana Johnson, Distance Learning Librarian, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois