Evidence Summary
Graduate Students May Need Information Literacy Instruction as Much as
Undergraduates
A Review of:
Conway, Kate. (2011). How prepared are students for postgraduate study?
A comparison of the information literacy skills of commencing undergraduate and
postgraduate studies students at Curtin University. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 42(2), 121-135.
Reviewed by:
Robin
E. Miller
Assistant
Professor and Research & Instruction Librarian
McIntyre
Library
University
of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Eau
Claire, Wisconsin, United States of America
Email:
millerob@uwec.edu
Received: 8 Apr. 2014 Accepted: 12 Aug. 2014
2014 Miller.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
Abstract
Objective – To determine whether there is a difference in the
information literacy skills of postgraduate and undergraduate students
beginning an information studies program, and to examine the influence of
demographic characteristics on information literacy skills.
Design – Online, multiple choice questionnaire to test basic
information literacy skills.
Setting – Information studies program at a large university
in Western Australia.
Subjects – 64 information studies students who responded to an
email invitation to participate in an online questionnaire, a 44% response
rate. Of those responding, 23 were undergraduates and 41 were postgraduates.
Methods – Over the course of two semesters, an online survey
was administered. In order to measure student performance against established
standards, 25 test questions were aligned with the Australian and New Zealand
Information Literacy Framework (ANZIIL) (Bundy, 2004), an adapted version of
the ACRL Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education (Association of College
& Research Libraries, 2000). In the first semester that the survey was
administered, 9 demographic questions were asked and 11 in the second semester.
Participants were invited to respond voluntarily to the questionnaire via
email. Results were presented as descriptive statistics, comparing
undergraduate and postgraduate student performance. The results were not tested
for statistical significance and the author did not control for confounding
variables.
Main Results – Postgraduate respondents scored an average of 77%
on the test questionnaire, while undergraduates scored an average of 69%. The
25% of respondents who had previous work experience in a library achieved
average scores of 79%, in contrast to 69% among those who had not worked in a
library. Average scores for undergraduates in the 20-30 age group were 81%,
while those in the 30-40 age group averaged 65%. Among both undergraduate and
postgraduate students, scores may indicate deficiencies in information literacy
skills in several areas, including parsing citations, strategies for locating
specific content, and defining an information need.
Conclusion – The study concludes that postgraduate students’
information literacy skills may be marginally better than the skills of
undergraduates. Age was found to be associated with higher performance among
undergraduate students, and a variety of “basic” information literacy skills
may elude many respondents. These findings might prompt librarians and
instructors to look closely at gaps in information literacy knowledge among
students at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Commentary
Librarians and instructional faculty may assume that
new postgraduate students possess a high level of information literacy, instilled
during their undergraduate careers. The author attempts to test this
assumption.
Rather than testing the information literacy skills of
only postgraduate students, Conway chose to take a comparative approach by
testing two populations, postgraduate and undergraduate students of Information
Studies at Curtin University. The literature review notes that few studies have
compared basic information literacy competencies of postgraduate and
undergraduate students. The author suggests that undergraduates are the focal
point of literature about information literacy skill level; however, the
literature review omits recent publications focused on graduate students
(Siegel, 2009; Catalano, 2010; McMillen, Garcia,
& Bolin, 2010).
Conway acknowledges the limitations of multiple choice
tests for the higher order thinking associated with information literacy.
Presumably due to cost and other practical considerations, the author did not
use a standardized information literacy skills test like SAILS, which is proprietary
and not open access. The survey instrument was developed using questions from a
Curtin University Library online information literacy tutorial that is no
longer available (Curtin University Library, 2010), and questions that have
appeared in previously administered tests of information literacy skills (Mittermeyer & Quirion, 2003),
though some tests cited by the author are not readily available for
consultation (Stokes, 2005; Van Zijl, Bennett,
Darling, Shields & Bennett, 2006). The choice to use previously
administered questions may lend validity to some of the questions and findings.
The author reports that tests using similar questions yielded lower average
scores than the Curtin University test, speculating this finding is due to
inclusion of postgraduates in the subject pool and the significant population
of subjects who had previous library work experience. Unfortunately, the survey
instrument was not appended.
A serious limitation of this study is that the author
did not test the results for statistical significance. As Conway notes, this
research cannot be generalized because of the small respondent pool; however,
the test was also not administered to a random sample of students. Choosing to
test Information Studies students means that these findings have no point of
comparison to postgraduates and undergraduates in other disciplines.
While postgraduates generally performed better than
undergraduates, the author notes that the overall performance of postgraduates
was only 8% higher than undergraduates. The author particularly notes a
correlation between age and skills performance, with respondents in their
twenties scoring higher on some questions than respondents in their thirties.
Of interest to librarians, respondents had higher scores if they had previous
library work experience, but scores were not improved by previous information
literacy instruction. However, as reported, these results do not control for
confounding variables.
For practitioners, the most essential conclusion of
this research is that both postgraduates and undergraduates who took the skills
test appeared to struggle with concepts that librarians and classroom
instructors may view as basic. Serious limitations of research design
notwithstanding, this research may remind librarians of the need to integrate
information literacy instruction throughout undergraduate and postgraduate
experiences.
References
Association of College & Research Libraries. (2000). Information literacy competency standards
for higher education. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. Retrieved
from http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/standards/standards.pdf
Bundy, A. (Ed.). (2004). Australian
and New Zealand information literacy framework: Principles, standards and practice,
2nd ed. Adelaide: Australian and New Zealand Institute for
Information Literacy. Retrieved from http://archive.caul.edu.au/info-literacy/InfoLiteracyFramework.pdf
Catalano, A. J. (2010). Using ACRL standards to assess the information
literacy of graduate students in an education program. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 5(4), 21-38.
Retrieved from http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/8878
Curtin University Library. (2010). InfoTrekk. Retrieved from http://library.curtin.edu.au/studyand-research-tools/online-tutorials/infotrekk/
McMillen, P. S.,
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doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2010.06.007
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Siegel, G. (Ed.). (2009). Libraries
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