IASL Research Abstracts

IASL Research Abstracts: 177

Findings: In New Zealand, few secondary school teachers have an understanding of information literacy and confuse ICT with information literacy. Although teachers report they use an information stage model with their students, they are unable to name stages. Teachers feel their students should already have been taught information literacy skills in earlier grades.

Abstract: There is very little research looking at how much teachers from any country actually know about information literacy and how they develop information literacy skills with their students. This contrasts with the increasing number of research projects in recent years which focus on the influence that school libraries, teacher librarians and/or library media specialists have on student learning. This paper reports on findings from a research project which investigated the understanding, knowledge and teaching of information literacy processes of secondary teachers from five urban co-educational state secondary schools situated in a variety of socio-economic areas. The inclusion in the national senior school qualification, National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) of achievement standards requiring the use of some or all of a research process has placed more emphasis on the need for New Zealand secondary schools students to become information literate. It could be expected then that New Zealand secondary teachers have a good understanding of the concept of information literacy and are explicitly teaching these skills in order to develop information literate students at all levels as well as preparing senior students for assessment requirements. However there is little research in New Zealand which has tested this assumption. Similar calls for more professional development in the area of information literacy skills have been heard in other countries and it seemed timely therefore to investigate more closely the situation with New Zealand secondary teachers.

Probert, E. (2006). An investigation into the teaching of information literacy skills by teachers in New Zealand secondary schools. In The Multiple Faces of Literacy: Reading, Knowing, Doing -- IASL Reports, 2006: Selected Papers from the 35th annual conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, and the Tenth International Forum on Research in School Librarianship, Lisbon, Portugal, 3-7 July 2006. Ana Bela Martins, Antonio Pina Falcao, Elsa Conde, Isabel Andrade, Manuele Barreto Nunes, Maria Jose Vitorino, editors. International Association of School Librarianship, Erie (PA), USA, 2006. ISBN: 978-1-890861-32-2.

Subject Categories: 10, 19, 22