[Web4lib] Some results from the Survey of American College Students: Student Evaluation of Information Literacy Instruction

[primarydat at aol.com]

Primary Research Group has published: The Survey of American College Students: Student Evaluation of Information Literacy Instruction, ISBN 1-57440-116-5.      

 

This report presents approximately 125 tables of data exploring how full time college students in the United States view and use and evaluate their college library’s information literacy training.  The data in the report is based on a representative sample of more than 400 full time college students in the United States. Data is broken out by 16 criteria including gender, grade point average, major field of study, income level of students, type and size of college, and mean SAT acceptance score of colleges, among other variables. 

 

The report presents data on the percentage of students who have received information literacy training, how they evaluate the effectiveness of that training, how they perceive their need for additional training, whether they believe that an information literacy course should be required, if they have ever used online tutorials provided by the library, and how they evaluate their own information literacy skills. 

 

Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: 

 

•           More than 67% of the students in the sample say that they have received instruction on how to use their college’s library. Older students are much more likely than younger ones to say that they have not received library or information literacy 
instruction.

 

•           Nearly 82% of students at colleges with a mean SAT acceptance score of greater than 1950 say that they have received library or information literacy instruction.

 

•           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=2
0in 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. 

 

•           Students who consider themselves religious were far more likely to support a required information literacy course than students who did not think of themselves as particularly religious or who were not at all religious.

 

•           More than 21.4% of students in colleges that offered PHD’s but that were not full research universities noted that they needed additional information literacy training.

 

For further information view our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com