First years and Information Literacy

Another belated report from the ANZIIL conference in Brisbane's South Bank Institute a couple of weeks ago! (photos show bougainvillea creeping on an arbour on the South Bank). Glynis Shields, from the National Library of New Zealand, presented results from a survey investigating the Information Literacy first year students at Otago Polytechnic. School teachers and lecturers were asked about their expectations of students in the areas of identifying key terms and concepts for an assignment; Searching for information; Selecting & evaluating information ; acknowledging sources; presenting and communicating information. 150 students were asked about what they thought their skill levels were, and also took a multiple choice test based again on the Quebec survey (Ref 1).

Basically, in all categories students were far more confident about their abilities than was justified by the results of the test. For example, for selecting/evaluating the confidence level was 81.5%, whilst the competence level was 33.6%. To give a broad impression of the other results, the expectations of lecturers and of teachers in thebe next-to-last year of school were a lot nearer the competence level, but the final-year school teachers were more optimistic about pupils’ skills, though not as optimistic as the students themselves. As an example, in the Evaluating/selecting category, the figures were 40.7% (Year 12 teachers), 62.6% (Year 13 teachers), 41.5% (lecturers).

Like the colleagues from Monash University who used the Quebec questions, the point was not that this was a perfect way of diagnosing information literacy levels, since again the limitations of such a multiple choice format were acknowledged. However, it was being very useful as a way of highlighting the problem both with schools and with higher education. Already it seems it had had an impact at meetings of school principals, and the work was being disseminated carefully through publication and talks to educators and managers (i.e. not just to librarians!)

The most depressing note emerged from a question that had been asked of teachers and academics about who should provide support in the IL areas mentioned above. Librarians rated very low - the highest score was for 36.6% of lecturers thinking that librarians could support students in developing skills for searching (only 8.7% of teachers saw a role for librarians here). The lowest score of all was in terms of defining the topic, identifying keywords etc - no lecturers thought librarians had a role and only 1% of teachers. Glynis said that these statistics were also causing a reaction e.g. amongst school principals, who could see that the librarians were being undervalued.

Ref 1. Mittermeyer, D. and Quirion, D. (2003) Information literacy: study of incoming first year undergraduates in Quebec. http://crepuq.qc.ca/documents/bibl/formation/studies_Ang.pdf