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Reading Between the Lines: Developing First Year Education Students’ Information Literacy through Instruction and Scholarly Engagement
Conference poster   Peer reviewed

Reading Between the Lines: Developing First Year Education Students’ Information Literacy through Instruction and Scholarly Engagement

Anne Drabble, Beverly Dann, Michael Nagel, Shan Kelly and Janet Martin
Queensland University Educators Showcase (QUES): Celebrating excellence, sharing innovation, and building collaboration, 2018 (Sunshine Coast, Australia, 28-Sep-2018)
University of the Sunshine Coast
2018
url
https://www.usc.edu.au/media/19142763/ques-full-program.pdfView
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Abstract

Curriculum and Pedagogy Specialist Studies in Education first year education students information literacy higher education first year experience student retention
Research identifies a diverse cohort enrolling into University with increasingly more students from low socio- economic status backgrounds, and many first in family attending university. (McKenxie & Egea, 2016). The students' first year experiences impact on student retention and success rates. Therefore, first year students require more support to feel a sense of belonging, and to successfully engage in the learning environment. Moreover, undergraduate students' use of academic libraries is strongly linked to the development of student Information Literacy skills; student retention (Soria, Fransen & Nackerud, 2017) student academic success; and student engagement (Laird Nelson and Kuh, 2005). This USC funded pilot project aims to examine existing Information Literacy skills of first year students enrolled in primary and early childhood initial teacher education programs, and explores how Information Literacy intervention influences students' ability to engage with, and incorporate information from scholarly research to their knowledge and use in assessment tasks. This poster presentation summarises information gathered through pre and post Information Literacy questionnaires completed by the students across four campuses. Preliminary data analysis confirms some of the recognised challenges in engaging first year students in understanding and using academic information, as personal confidence of skills was generally rated high, but application of Information Literacy skills did not rate strongly. For example, 79% of students were confident when reading for information, but only 8% reported actually reading for information! Students scored low results in identification and searching for scholarly sources. However, more positively regarded learning about the library as very important. Initial analytics of students' independent viewing of Information Literacy videos indicated 80% of students viewed the video on locating articles from a reference or citation, 55% viewed the video on building on a key word search. However, only 17% of students viewed the video on Information has value. In this initial project early analysis suggests that more encouragement or supervised engagement with intervention strategies, such as watching short videos, attending library tutorials or undertaking coding strategies, would be likely to result in higher improvements in student understanding and Information Literacy skills when using information. These preliminary results provide clear guidance which will inform the improvement of intervention strategies, particularly as the skill and understanding level of students when using information is better defined.

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