Journal of Information Literacy Business information literacy teaching at different academic levels: an exploration of skills and implications for instructional design

Abstract

"By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." Abstract This study investigates the difference among students" discipline-specific information literacy (IL) skills by studying first-year and final-year undergraduate business students. An online IL tutorial was designed and delivered to both student groups with a two-fold goal. First, the researchers wanted to compare students" IL skills to test academic staff"s assumptions that business students who are about to graduate have already acquired the requisite IL despite the lack of mandatory business-specific IL sessions. The findings suggest that first-year and finalyear business students are not significantly different in their performance and that both groups received a significant positive impact as a result of taking the same IL tutorial online. Second, the study analyses how well the online IL tutorial, with its focus on combining instructional videos with active learning exercises, performs in delivering content related to different elements of IL, as defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL 2010). The findings indicate that the online IL tutorial is more effective for some skills than for others, suggesting that it will be beneficial to explore different instructional designs in collaboration with academic staff to improve the current IL tutorial in these areas. This study adds to research on the effectiveness of online IL tutorials and raises questions related to their design. The findings can inform librarians" decisions on how to design online learning targeting students from different academic levels