PREPARING FOR INFORMATION LITERACY – A CHALLENGE FOR NURSING EDUCATION TO-DAY

The increased reliance on knowledge-based practice in nursing and the expectation that nurses participate in life-long learning necessitates a greater focus on acquiring information literacy skills during nursing education.

In this presentation the end-results from a three year project, where one of the aims was to improve under-graduate nursing students’ information literacy through increased attention to these skills in the curriculum, are discussed.

Background
In an earlier study a colleague and I found that students made little use of electronic library resources in their assignments. Until 2004, at the university college where I am employed, the librarians were responsible for teaching the students about library resources and there was little collaboration between them and nursing faculty members. International literature recommends the integration of information literacy skills in the nursing curriculum as well as close collaboration between nursing faculty and library staff in the development of suitable learning methods. A project was developed including both these aspects.

Design and method
A quasi-experimental design was employed. The 2004 autumn cohort was divided into two classes at the beginning of their studies. One class was subjected to the intervention whilst the other followed the ordinary curriculum. The intervention was developed in cooperation with faculty librarians and consisted of written feedback from librarians to students regarding search strategies, an increased number of mandatory assignments requiring searching for, using and evaluating library and Internet resources. Both classes received instruction from faculty librarians in the use of electronic library resources and help to critically review literature resources from nursing faculty.
A questionnaire was administered to the experimental class at the beginning of the first year and to both classes towards the end of their third year. The questionnaires contained questions regarding the students’ information literacy and demographics.

Results
There was a significant improvement in the experimental classes’ grasp of the use search techniques from the beginning to the end of their studies. However, there were no significant differences between the two classes’ comprehension of these techniques at the end of the third year. Notwithstanding these results, the findings demonstrated that many of the students in both classes did not understand the purpose of central search techniques and important elements of source evaluation. The low response rate can represent a distorted view of the students’ ability.

Discussion
Although there was a considerable overall increase in the experiment classes’ search technique at the end of the program, under half of them understood the use of Boolean operators, truncation and MeSH terms. Many of them could not correctly identify an URL or criteria for evaluating library and internet resources, though the majority of them understood peer review. Similar results were obtained for the ordinary class. It would seem that the number and type of assignments, written search strategies and of feedback to the search strategies was insufficient to improve the experiment classes’ grasp of search and evaluation techniques beyond that of the ordinary students’.

Conclusion
Students must be given more opportunities to develop and receive feedback regarding information literacy skills.