Relationship of Students’ Perceived Information Literacy Skills with Personal and Academic Variables

Abstract

A diagnostic assessment of information literacy (IL) skills of students is useful to design an effective IL instruction program for them. This paper reports results of a study conducted to investigate students’ perceived IL skills in the University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. Using a locally developed 20-item scale, a cross-sectional survey was conducted on 1,414 conveniently selected students from all 73 academic units of the university. The findings indicate that the students were more comfortable in basic computing and internet related activities but less comfortable on specialized information searching tasks. The relationship of ‘total score’ of students’ IL skills was explored with six personal and academic variables (i.e., gender, discipline of study, degree level, social background, English language proficiency, and access to computer at home). This baseline study may be helpful for designing and implementing IL instruction programs in universities.