Assessing information literacy skills among young information age students in Singapore
| Published date | 15 May 2017 |
| Date | 15 May 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2016-0138 |
| Pages | 335-353 |
| Author | Schubert Foo,Shaheen Majid,Yun Ke Chang |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Assessing information literacy
skills among young information
age students in Singapore
Schubert Foo and Shaheen Majid
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and
Yun Ke Chang
Department of Computer Information Science, Higher College of Technology,
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to assess knowledge of Singapore Grade 5 (11 years old) students’
understanding and proficiency in basic information literacy (IL) skills of defining information tasks, selecting
information sources, seeking information from sources and synthesising and using information.
Design/methodology/approach –A 38-item multiple-choice question assessment instrument was used to
assess the students’IL skills based on the i-Competent IL model. The instrument first developed in 2010
was refined and expanded to increase the robustness and accuracy of assessment for the study.
It was administered to 17 primary schools in Singapore in November 2015. The maximum possible score of
54 was scaled up to 100 to report the overall mean score for ease of reference and comparison. A total of
2,399 returns were obtained and analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 22.0 to compute the
mean scores, IL stage-level scores. The study also investigated for any significant differences in performance
between male and female students, and students with or without access to the internet at home.
Findings –The students achieved an overall mean score of 53.39 which is below a recommended acceptable
score of 60 or 70 advocated in a number of past studies. The two worst performing areas of IL skills were
synthesising and using information and seeking information from sources with mean scores of 45.89 and
48.81, respectively. A review of the highest number of incorrectanswers suggests that students had difficulty
in identifying key information from an information task narrative, understanding the use of reference sources
and role of librarians, distinguishing between a fact and opinion, and adopting the best strategy for searching.
Girls outperformed boys with an overall mean score of 55.38 vs 51.50. Students with internet access at home
fared better than those without access to it with a score of 53.67 vs 45.81. The overall poor results of the
survey suggest an urgent need to review the IL education landscape in the Singapore school system, revisit
polices, priorities and assess the relevance and effectiveness of the IL curriculum, practical hands-on classes,
and interventions that are currently employed in schools.
Practical implications –The study helped identify areas of IL skills strengths and weakness among Grade
5 students in Singapore schools. It provides recommendations for follow up actions for education authority
and schools to improve the situation.
Originality/value –This study was prompted to provide an assessment after a national IL initiative was
launched in 2012 to inculcate IL skills among the school-going children as part of creating a value-driven
education system. This is the first reported set of findings for a large-scale survey conducted to measure and
ascertain the IL skills level among Grade 5 students.
Keywords Singapore, Information literacy, Assessment, Grade 5, i-Competent model, Primary students
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Being information literate is a vital and necessary competency along with many other
competencies like digital, media, numeric, visual and others, particularly among our
information age “Google generation”students who have easy access to an exponential
growth of questionable quality online information.
Educators have long proposed and emphasised the importance of establishing authentic
assessment, resource-based learning and creative and critical thinking approaches in the
school curriculum (e.g. Grabinger and Dunlap, 1995; Herrington and Herrington, 2005).
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 69 No. 3, 2017
pp. 335-353
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-08-2016-0138
Received 23 August 2016
Revised 28 September 2016
16 October 2016
31 October 2016
Accepted 16 November 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
335
Assessing
information
literacy skills
These Generation Z students largely resort to the internet to tap on vast amounts of free
information resources. They increasingly search, trust and use online information and
incorporate it into their assignments and projects. While this is a logical right step to
make them independent learners of tomorrow, appropriate education and guidance must be
included through a well designed and developed IL curriculum in schools where
the students can be taught how to look for relevant information from various sources,
analyse its quality, and appropriately use the obtained information.
In Singapore, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has recognised the need to develop such a
national information literacy (IL) programme across different grades and subjects in public
schools. This initiative was carried out in 2012 in collaboration with the National Library
Board (NLB), National Institute of Education (NIE) and Nanyang Technological University
(NTU) to develop an IL curriculum framework to be introduced in specific subjects across
the curriculum with the necessary resources provided by NLB (Mokhtar et al., 2013). In order
to gauge the effectiveness of this initiative, there is a need to measure IL competencies of
these students at different grades levels. In this respect, a set of IL skills/competencies
assessment questionnaires was developed for Grade 3, 5 and 9 students by the IL academics
in NTU. The first national assessment was conducted in 2013 for all these levels (Foo, Majid,
Mokhtar, Zhang, Chang, Luyt and Theng, 2014; Chang et al., 2012; Majid et al., 2016), and the
second assessment was conducted for Grade 5 students in late 2015 and Grade 9 students in
early 2016. This study reports the IL assessment findings of 2015 survey of Grade
5 (11-year-old) students across 17 geographically dispersed schools in Singapore.
Related literature
This section provides a brief review of IL assessment and in particular, the IL assessments
carried out to date in Singapore.
Assessing IL skills provide the impetus to understand students’skills, identify areas of
strengths and weaknesses, help formulate appropriate pedagogical changes and
intervention programmes, as well as provide accountability of such an initiative (Oakleaf
and Kaske, 2009; Foo, Majid, Mokhtar, Zhang, Chang, Luyt and Theng, 2014). The three
major assessment approaches include knowledge and skills tests, performance assessments
and informal assessments. The first approach of knowledge and skills tests is most widely
employed and reported. Such tests are less resource-intensive and provide a useful basis to
allow comparisons across time intervals at the individual and institutional level (Oakleaf
and Kaske, 2009). Many such international IL tests and assessment have been developed
and used extensively by many. Examples include Standardized Assessment of Information
Literacy Skills (SAILS) (Kent State University Libraries, 2016a), Tool for Real-time
Assessment of Information Literacy (TRAILS) (Kent State University Libraries, 2016b),
Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA) (Central Michigan University, 2016) and
Information Literacy Test ( James Madison University, 2016) which are used to assess
discrete IL skills. These tests have been developed across different grades of students,
including college and university students, basically US based, but are widely adapted and
used by other schools and institutions across the world.
For example, TRAILS was used at a high school in Columbus, Ohio where it was used to
longitudinally track a cohort of students where they observe that the high school seniors
(Grade 10) scored significantly better in IL skills than they did as freshmen (Grade 9) (Kovalik
et al., 2012). Similarly TRAILS used in the Montgomery County Public Schools cluster to assess
IL skills of Grades 5, 8 and 11 students where they found that results were positive for each of
the five subsets of IL skills when compared against a grade-level benchmark except for one
“using information responsibly, ethically and legally”(Baileyand Paul, 2012). More i mportantly,
they found that students with better IL skills had higher academic achievements (higher reading
scores) –a salient outcome observed in many past IL studies particularly in the USA.
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AJIM
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