An interdisciplinary assessment of information literacy instruction

Abstract

Information literacy is a crucial skill often overlooked by faculty in higher education, who expect incoming Gen Z students to have some ability to navigate the information landscape appropriately and efficiently either from prior high school instruction or simply by the ubiquity of information access. Assessments of college students' information literacy paints a different picture, indicating that information literacy instruction is required and that deliberate efforts should be made to aid students in proper evaluation and use of informational media. This study investigates the value of generalized information literacy instruction at a medium-sized, public 4-year university in a rural area. Student knowledge is assessed pre- and post-instruction to determine specific impacts of information literacy instruction on various facets of information literacy – source quality, relevance, and context. Specifically, the purpose of this research is to determine (1) whether information literacy varies across students in different fields/disciplines and (2) if so, whether generalized information literacy instruction tends to close those cross-disciplinary gaps or extend existing disparities. Data collected herein demonstrate that gains in information literacy vary substantially by academic discipline. For example, students in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts began with the second-highest average pre-instruction scores (75.00 %) and exhibited the largest gains between pre- and post-instruction assessments (+12.14 %). The results obtained in this study indicate that generalized instruction tends to inflate existing disparities in information literacy between disciplines. Based on these findings, there is ample evidence to suggest that discipline-specific information literacy instruction could provide students with larger individual gains and potentially allow information literacy to converge across fields.