During the summer, incoming first-year students were asked to take a survey meant to evaluate their information literacy skills.  This survey was developed by academic librarians and is freely shared with other institutions.  We chose 16 questions from the available question bank to help us measure students’ familiarity with a variety of information literacy skills. The survey was administered through the students’ summer Brightspace course and was promoted by Dean Morrison.  Ultimately, 314 students responded, approximately 64% of the total number of first-year students.

When we compare the results to the learning objectives and assessment rubrics in our Teaching Information Literacy for Faculty guide, we find that most of the results indicate that students’ skills are in the Developing (Level 1) to Competent (Level 2) range. There are few results indicating that students have Strong (Level 3) skills. However, there are often wide variations within a section.  For example, within the Search and Find section, students were surprisingly good at recognizing the best set of keywords to use for a research topic, but fewer understood what kind of results would come up if they put a name in the author field of a database.  

Another area of particular weakness seems to be understanding the elements of a citation.

Interestingly, students scored well (83%) on the two questions related to plagiarism.  However, we know that recognizing the definitions of plagiarism and paraphrasing is different from knowing how and when to cite in order to prevent plagiarism.

For more information about the survey results, see the Teaching Information Literacy for Faculty research guide.