Recent research by the University of Sheffield found a discrepancy between the expectations of academic staff and the ability of undergraduates to effectively find information for their academic work. The academic assumption being that
secondary schools have already instilled the necessary skills. In reality 45% of Sheffield’s undergraduates felt unprepared for this aspect of University and over half of them wanted support and guidance in finding information (Webber et al, 2013). Research arising from Project Information Literacy in the United States mirrors Sheffield’s findings with most students feeling that skills developed in school did not adequately prepare them for college work (Head, 2013). Yet in the effort to meet UK Government targets, many schools and further education
colleges fail to develop key information skills, as students are “spoon-fed towards exams” (Webber et al, 2013, slide 34).
It would seem that many academics forget the haphazard process by which they developed their own, often poor, IL skills and frequently sidestep library resources to use easier options such as Google Scholar. Indeed a direct challenge by an academic that Google Scholar is better than Summon, led us to rename our first year workshop Better than Google. It is apparent that, just like students, many academics have been seduced by the increasing availability of information through easy to use web-based search engines. By operating within a narrow discipline, they as academics are able to use their experience and established knowledge to develop a strong affinity with key publications and other experts and aggregate knowledge more readily (Lloyd, 2012). This allows them to work in “flexible, networked and non-linear ways” (Coonan, 2011). However, for the student, this network is unavailable and they need to be able to obtain knowledge more widely through genuine structured research or through seemingly laborious processes to verify the quality of what they have found. Academics sometimes assume that less successful students have simply lacked the motivation to develop their skills,
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that practice makes perfect and that ultimately students will have attained sufficient levels of IL by the time they graduate (Badke, 2010).
Badke (2010) describes a vicious circle in which students who have developed successful ‘coping strategies’ will themselves become academics and then perpetuate the belief that IL skills can be easily acquired. This is confirmed by research carried out by De Montfort University which found that, despite academics’ support of the importance of IL skills and its value in the academic work of students, there was little effort on their part to develop the integration of information skills into the curriculum assuming that these skills would be “picked up” by students during their time at University through a process of ‘osmosis’ or ‘trial and error’ (Orr, Appleton and Wallin, 2001; Weetman, 2005; McGuinness, 2006; Weetman DaCosta, 2010). Yet other lecturers have unrealistically high expectations of what their students need to know at any given level. For example, we have been asked to teach citation searching and bibliographic management tools to first year undergraduate students, something that we would reserve for postgraduates.
As a consequence, students fail to understand the benefit of IL skills to their academic work, similarly assuming that such skills will be attained by default during the academic process (Badke, 2010). It has been suggested that only when IL skills become an assessed and credit-bearing element of the curriculum will students take them more seriously and value their significance in the academic process (Stubbings and Franklin, 2006; Weetman DaCosta, 2010).
Chen and Lin (2011) believe that the idea of IL remains an unfamiliar concept to non-librarians who appear to equate these skills with simply knowing how to search for a book on the library catalogue, or, at most, how to search for journal articles. Consequently the assumption is that a one-shot session will suffice or that our brief ten minute presentation during Induction Week has covered the necessary skills for students to be ‘up and running’. Badke states that “any notion of sophisticated education is precluded, much as it would be if one were assuming that a teenager was competent to drive a car after 40 minutes of explanation and 15 minutes of practice” (2010, p.130).
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In reality the attainment of true IL skills requires time and practice based
experience (Badke, 2010). We, like Macklin (2001), believe information skills to be an integral part of such academic teaching. However we often struggle to have IL learning outcomes included in programmes and even when they are, we find academic staff ignore them. Time constraints or the inability to see relevance often appear to be the reasons given by academic staff for not addressing these learning outcomes. This experience is mirrored in other institutions where IL skills sessions are brief and disassociated from the academic programme (Primary Research Group, in Badke, 2010).
The failure to run IL sessions in some programmes is despite our own survey findings which demonstrated that attendance at a library workshop improved student marks (Edwards and Hill, 2012). This is validated by research carried out by the University of Huddersfield (Stone, Ramsden and Pattern, 2011) which indicates a correlation between library usage and students’ final degree results. Asher describes the benefits of our IL teaching thus:
“If students can learn the basic skills a librarian can teach them, superficial or not, they will find themselves swimming forever in a river of ideas and that is what lifelong learning is all about.” (2003, p54)
Information literacy thus continues to be perceived as ancillary to the main business of the institution rather than a set of skills which underpin the academic process. Consequently it is imperative that academics gain a better understanding of what IL entails, if it is to become a priority in HE. Only when institutions fully integrate IL into the curriculum through collaboration amongst all stakeholders will students understand its importance and value to their academic study (Callison, Budny and Thomas, 2005).