Assessing the Information Literacy Skills of Students in an Online Graduate Program
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation (20 minute presentation)
Target Audience
Higher Education
Location
Room 212
Proposal
See presentation description.
Short Description
The popularity of online education means programs continue to grow and more degrees are developed. Graduate degrees, in particular, are popular with working adults who wish to change careers or focus on content unrelated to their undergraduate major. While information literacy studies have been done with onsite graduate students (George et al., 2006; Jamaili & Nicholas, 2007), little is known about the skills of students in the online cohort. This paper examines the information literacy of newly admitted students to a fully-online graduate program. The paper will discuss the challenges associated with information literacy when the cohort varies greatly in age, time away from post-secondary education, diversity of current interests, and previous degree focus. The paper will present the results of research assessing the skills of this online cohort. Finally, this paper will make recommendations that may assist in meeting the information seeking needs of any fully online graduate cohort. Data on information literacy skills of new graduate students was gathered though written self-assessments and comments posted in the learning management system. An assignment, the development of a collaborative research resource guide was given mid-semester. At the end of the semester, two measures were used to determine if there had been an increase in information literacy skills. A bibliometric analysis of their cited sources in the final paper was conducted; in addition, student comments regarding their own increase in information literacy were also analyzed. Recommendations from this study that can inform libraries and administrators will be presented.
Keywords
Online graduate students, Information literacy, Library instruction
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Palmer, Laura, "Assessing the Information Literacy Skills of Students in an Online Graduate Program" (2009). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 27.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2009/2009/27
Assessing the Information Literacy Skills of Students in an Online Graduate Program
Room 212
See presentation description.
