March 26, 2008
Information-Literacy Classes Surge at Community Colleges
Community college libraries in the United States and Canada are seeing a huge demand for information-literacy courses, according to a recent survey by Primary Research Group Inc. Such courses are designed to help students find, communicate, and critically evaluate online information. The average percentage increase in the number of these classes offered from the fall semester of 2006 to the fall semester of 2007 was 38.1 percent, according to the survey.
The survey also found that about 5 percent of colleges of all types required students to take a one- or two-credit information-literacy course in order to graduate. About 115 colleges were questioned for the survey, which was conducted at the end of 2007.—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday March 26, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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I teach a general “student success” course at a community/technical college and we spend a great deal of time on the information literacy components. My incoming freshman do not know when they are plagiarizing. They also don’t understand that crafting a research paper involves more than retrieving information (blindly from Google) and compiling it using double-space, courier 10. Asking them to actually risk expressing their own thoughts? They’d rather come to class naked.*
As long as they reach college age without these skills, we’ll have to teach them in college. This is partly why “junior” colleges were first formed.
*Coming to class naked is not an option… not even for extra credit. :)
— K. Tribble Mar 27, 02:23 PM #
Stretched local school budgets have led to the elimination of K-12 school library professionals in many states. This shortfall in access to information literacy instruction in pre-college education settings will impact college instruction demands for many years.
— Kate Mar 27, 05:38 PM #