Assessing information literacy

In a post to the ASSESS listserv, James Moses reports on the Survey of American College Students: Student Evaluation of Information Literacy Instruction, published by the Primary Research Group. Some of the report’s findings:

• Most students find library instruction helpful. About 18.5% of students found the instruction that they received useless or largely useless while 31.72% considered it somewhat helpful and close to half considered it helpful or very helpful.
• Students in the hard sciences, social sciences and business/economics were the most likely to say that the training benefited them.
• 55% of the students in the sample felt that they were reasonably competent in using the various online databases offered by their college.
• The youngest students, those aged 19 and younger, were somewhat more likely to consider themselves not very competent in library skills, but even then only about 9% of them characterized themselves this way.
• Suburbanites were the most likely to consider themselves highly competent while those who grew up in rural areas were the least likely to consider themselves the same.
• 20.3% of students majoring in the social sciences thought of themselves as highly competent but only 4.17% of students majoring in education thought of themselves this way, a particularly frightening statistic, given that many of these students will become the next generation of primary school teachers.