Information Literacy Skills of Management Sciences’ Students

Abstract

The objective of this study was to determine the information literacy (IL) skills of Management Sciences students. A questionnaire was adopted to collect data from 254 currently enrolled graduate and undergraduate students of two universities, one public sector and one private sector, situated in Lahore, Pakistan. An equal-sized stratified random sampling technique through random numbers was used for this purpose. The results showed that the majority of the students used the university library infrequently to locate their requisite information. Most of the students required a moderate level of information and preferred to get this information in an online format. The opinion of most of the students showed that they were proficient in using internet services (e.g. Google, Yahoo etc.) and different websites to identify their required information. The findings revealed that most of the students were unanimous in their skills to precisely recognize and describe the information they required. This study highlights the importance of IL skills, in order that students can become lifelong learners in retrieving, using, organizing, and presenting their information. The findings of this study would provide some insightful guidelines to university management, policy makers, and those concerned to augment and increase the IL training sessions and programs in Pakistan at the university level. These findings could be implemented on other universities with the same teaching and learning system, strategies, and circumstances