Publication details
Information Literacy of University Students and its Improvement by a Campus-Wide Course Comparison of Czech Private and Public University
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Information literate students have an advantage in their academic and personal life in the information society (Shao & Purpur, 2016). Research evaluating the level of information literacy (IL) of university students is quite common in different countries. Landová et al. (2016) mapped the situation in the Czech Republic, but their research is limited to public universities. Kovářová (2018) published an analysis of the IL level of students at the Masaryk University (public) and its improvement by a campus-wide course. But research comparing IL of students of public and private universities is missing. We applied original research of Kovářová (2018) to a private Ambis University. The first goal of this survey was to reveal the level of IL of students in the private university through a self-evaluation and test (objective evaluation). The campus-wide IL course could improve this level. We can find similar courses at both universities with two crucial differences. The course is optional and purely online at the Masaryk University (after this MU) but compulsory and blended at Ambis. The second goal was to identify changes in the competencies of students after the semester course by comparing the pretest and post-test results. The paper focuses on the new information about the IL of students of a private university and comparison with already published results from the public university. Online questionnaires collected data in the autumn semester 2019 at the Ambis (compared to autumn semesters in 2016 and 2017 at MU). We distributed each test to all students enrolled in the courses at the time of data collection. We used a similar questionnaire as a pretest in the original research (Kovářová, 2018); only a few questions were slightly modified to reflect differences at Ambis. We got 1168 pretest responses and compare them with 1287 pretest responses and 550 posttest responses from MU. T-tests will verify differences in pretests and post-tests and the private and public university. Preliminary results of pretests showed some similarities and differences both in self-evaluation and objective evaluation of student between universities. At both, students self-evaluated their internet search competencies as the best and searching in databases as the worst. At the opposite ends of the self-evaluation scale at universities, there are topics of sharing and cooperation (better rated at Ambis) and formal processing of their own text (better rated at MU). Students of MU self-evaluated their competencies generally better, but students of Ambis received higher pretest results. Students of Ambis had the most number of wrong answers (gradually) in narrowing topic, Creative Commons licences and types of graphs, on the contrary, they had the most correct answers in backup tools, visualisation and choosing an appropriate resource. Students of MU had the most problems with library services, Creative Commons licences and visualisation. They had the least problems then with choosing appropriate resources, social networks and orientation in a document. |