Assessing generic information literacy in first year

Discipline Area

Early Childhood Education

Key assessment issue addressed

Contextualisation of the generic ICT skills acquisition within the unit assessment tasks; online assessment of a large class of participating students on the extent of the use, utility and perceived value of the acquired skills.

The initiative

The initiative was supported by a Macquarie University Flagship Grant, and was targeted to address the generic skills of incoming early childhood students through collaboration with the Information Technology and Training Unit (IT&TU) of the Library. It aimed at providing training for ITC skills within the context of an online 100 level unit Teachers as Researchers. The online component of the unit provided training and application opportunities for students to access the unit content and to use the communication facilities of the unit web site; joining online discussions and reflections were a weighted unit requirement. The unit was then redesigned to integrate such skills as electronic database searches (Assignment 1), and researching the Internet for scholarly material (Assignment 2) within its assessments. These were staged tasks of an individual research proposal (1), followed by a collaborative research report of the actual research undertaken by the student teams (2). The library workshops in which training was provided took place two weeks prior to the assignments' due dates in 2000; in 2001 the electronic database searches were done through an online self-paced and self-assessed module entitled Libraries Online (LIBSOL) developed by the IT&TU. The training on researching for scholarly material on the Internet was conducted as a lecture by the IT&TU staff in 2001 instead of tutorial group workshops which took place in 2000.

An end-of-unit online questionnaire was also developed which sought to evaluate the students' extent of use, utility and perceived value of the unit and the ITC literacy it provided. In 2000, of the 292 students, 237 responded to the survey. Summary results suggest that the integration of information literacy within relevant and immediate learning experiences has been effective: they indicate 98% student satisfaction rating of the unit overall, and 96% satisfaction rating of the Library workshop components.

The reason for the initiative's effectiveness

The students reported substantially increased sense of empowerment and expected further applications of these skills to their tertiary study, presumably because their training was immediately put to use within a meaningful context; i.e., their unit assessment tasks, and because they view online learning and research skills as being crucially relevant to their university learning experiences and outcomes.

Further details

Dr Ayshe Talay-Ongan, Senior Lecturer
Institute of Early Childhood
Macquarie University, Sydney
Ayshe.talay-ongan@mq.edu.au