Incoming first year undergraduate students: How information literate are they?

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Mittermeyer, Diane

Affiliations: Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, McGill University, 3459 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. H3A 1Y1. Tel.: +514 398 3363; Fax: +514 398 7193, E-mail: diane.mittermeyer@mcgill.ca

Abstract: For many years academic librarians have been involved in the delivery of library instruction programs. Most of these librarians however have the impression that when students arrive at the university their knowledge of the information seeking process is quite limited. This paper presents a summary of a research which took place in the province of Quebec (Canada). As stated in the title, in essence the research question was: When entering the first year of undergraduate study, how information literate are the students? Over 3,000 participants returned a mail questionnaire representing a response rate of 56.9%. While 12 of the 15 universities participating to the study were French speaking, 3 of them were English speaking, adding bilingualism (French/English) to an already distinctive, highly cooperative, research design. Despite the limited number of variables (20), the results indicate that for many respondents, their knowledge of the basic elements characterizing the information seeking process is rather limited. For example, it was found that for 11 of the 20 variables under study, the highest rate of correct answers provided was less than 36%. For these variables, the rate of correct responses ranged from 12.7% to 35.8%.

DOI: 10.3233/EFI-2005-23401

Journal: Education for Information, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 203-232, 2005