Accessibility of resources and delivery methods as correlates of information literacy competence of undergraduates in southern Nigerian Universities

Abstract

Information literacy (IL) connotes ability to use information resources from various sources for making decisions and solving problems. The IL competence enables individuals to identify their information needs, locate, retrieve, critically evaluate, synthesise and use information resources ethically, and communicate the results. However, research reports revealed that undergraduate students in Southern Nigerian universities have poor IL competence. This study, therefore, sets out to determine the factors responsible for poor IL competence of the students, by adopting survey research design of correlational type. Multistage sampling was used to select a sample size of 1,967 from a population of 39, 338 final year undergraduate students in nine universities in Southern Nigeria.  Researcher-designed questionnaire and IL competence test were used for the data gathering. After validation by experts, the instruments were subjected to test-retest reliability with two weeks interval, and the overall coefficient yielded r = 0.87. The findings reveal that resources with high accessibility were: conducive library environment (75.5%), Internet (60.7%) and IL educators (60.4%). Instructional videos (35.5%) and web 2.0 (31.7%) had poor accessibility; face-to-face lectures in classrooms (78.5%) dominated IL instructions, whereas ICT laboratories (39.8%), power-point presentations (30.8%) and web 2.0/web-based tutorials (16.7%) were hardly used; students’ IL competence level was found to be very poor, with overall mean of 30 %. Strong positive and significant relationships were found among resources accessibility, delivery methods and IL competence, r_s(1541)=.919,p<0.05 and r_s(1541)=.919,p<0.05, respectively. The study concluded that resources and delivery methods were the factors affecting students’ level of IL competence, and recommended adequate provision of requisite resources, adoption and use of web-based IL instructional methods, sensitisation of the students on the essence of IL and development of IL competence framework for IL programmes in Southern Nigerian universities.

Keywords: Information Literacy Competence, Resources, Delivery Methods, Students, Universities