Date of Award

8-16-2024

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Yingxiao Qian

Abstract

The purpose of this action research was to evaluate the effect of instructional scaffolding on information literacy skills of college students in an English Composition I (ENG 101) course at Urban Community College in the Southeast. Information literacy is defined as a set of skills to recognize an information need as well as locate, evaluate, and effectively use information (American Library Association, 2021). Community college students may have insufficiencies in their information literacy skills due to lack prior information literacy experience in academic libraries or completing research projects (Head, 2013; Hincliffe et al., 2018). I developed an intervention that involved instructional scaffolding to help the information literacy skills of community college students. This study focused on three overarching research questions. The first question sought to explore how instructional scaffolding affects community college students’ information literacy skills at Urban Community College in the Southeast. The second question explored community college students’ perceptions towards information literacy after attending an information literacy instruction with instructional scaffolding. The third question explored how community college students describe their experience with the instructional scaffolding on information literacy.

The study involved online tutorials and class discussions that utilized instructional scaffolding strategies. The estimated number of participants was 15 to 20 college students who enrolled in each English Composition I (ENG 101) course. A convergent mixed methods approach was applied to collect both qualitative and quantitative forms of data at relatively the same time (Creswell, 2014; Rademaker & Polush, 2022), but the data was analyzed separately and then the results were compared to see if the findings confirm or disconfirm each other (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). Data collection consisted of Open Test of Information Literacy (OTIL), Perceptions of Information Literacy Skills (PILS) surveys, and student interviews. I analyzed the quantitative data with descriptive statistics and a paired samples t-test. I analyzed the qualitative data with inductive analysis.

Quantitative findings revealed that there was no significant change in students’ information literacy skills from before the information literacy intervention to after the information literacy intervention. Quantitative findings also revealed that students perceived themselves to have developing information literacy skills where they are applying information literacy practices but are still learning. Qualitative findings revealed that students perceived the information literacy instruction to be helpful, students’ search process changed to include more information literacy skills learned from instruction and resources from the library, and students gained more confidence in their searching. It is difficult to conclude the impact of the information literacy intervention from one semester’s worth of interactions and further research needs to be conducted. More research about information literacy in the community college environment in general needs to be conducted as it is an academic area that lacks research on.

Rights

© 2024, Huyen Maluck

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