Assessment of IL Educational Needs of Students

In order to investigate Hong Kong undergraduate student's information literacy knowledge and skills for designing the course content of the IL courseware, the project team of the UGC T&L Project on Information Literacy conducted a information educational needs study between November and December 2015. This study adopts mixed method approach to collect diverse forms of data with a strong emphasis on the local context, including observations and process analysis of information tasks performed by students in their natural educational settings, to throw light on how they think about information, where they seek it and how they find it, how they select, use and organize the information they find, and how they learn from it; in-depth interviews for a holistic study of individual student participants’ information literacy in which the project team will observe what happens, listen to what is said, and ask questions to throw a light on the issue that are the focus of the research; content analysis of students’ inquiry projects to review the information sources cited and their citation format; interviews of faculty members to understand their perceptions of students information behaviors; and IL self-assessment tool (RRSA-HK) built upon these findings.

For interview and in-depth observation of information behaviors of students, a number of students of the eight participating institutions will be invited to participate the IL needs task and interview. Student participants are from various faculties and years of study from each participating institutions, representing students in the discipline of health sciences, law, engineering, science, environmental science. Environmental studies, social sciences, education, business, humanities, design, and hotel & tourism management.

Findings will be used to establish an IL self-assessment tool specifically for students of the UGC-funded institutions.

Implementation Timetable

Core team: Johnny Yuen (PolyU), Carol Ma (PolyU)

Goal: To examine students’ information behaviors in a holistic manner under the natural environment

Date Task Responsible Team(s)
Oct 2015 Introductory session for the information task and interview Core team and task team from each JULAC library
Nov - Dec 2015 To recruit and conduct the information task and interview Core team and task team from each JULAC library
Jan – Mar 2016 Data Analysis Core team
TBC Interview with faculty members Core team and task team from each JULAC library

Last update: 15 Feb 2016