Information Literacy of Physical Science Graduate Students in the Information Age

Abstract

This article reports on findings from a survey exploring the information literacy of physical science graduate students. The study also describes the graduate students' perceptions of the physical and psychological components that enhance or detract from their ability to find, appraise, and use information and how they feel during the various stages of an information search. This snapshot investigation illustrates that physical science graduate students form an information-literate microcosm de spite the lack of formal library instruction. The students offer a small number of reasons why they may be inhibited from locating an informa tion source and report experiencing little anxiety as they search for infor mation. They also describe their ideal information-seeking environment as being within the comfort of their home or the convenience of the library. Further, they place some emphasis, but not total reliance, on the capability to connect to the Internet quickly. Relevance, quality, and speed are the cornerstones of a successful search quest. Recommendations for outreach to graduate students who are not native speakers of En glish are made. Also, suggestions are proposed for library instruction that is specifically designed for, and attracts a greater number of, physi cal science graduate students.ver the past two decades, technology has become an integral part of the fabric of academic life. Physical sci ence faculty and students employ tech nology every day on university cam puses as they e-mail colleagues all over the globe, word process manuscripts, create spreadsheets of data, and search online databases for information to support their teaching and research activities. Parallel with the increasing dependence on technology for daily tasks has been the unimaginable expan sion of information related to the physical sciences. Physical science li brarians and information specialists have taken advantage of the new tech nologies to organize, provide access to, and archive this wealth of information. However, the extent to which gradu ate students in the physical sciences are able to identify, find, appraise, and make effective use of the vast amounts of information available to them to ad dress a specific problem (i.e., their in formation literacy) has not been docu mented.

Information‐seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

“…Regarding applied methods for finding less recent information, a survey of astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists at the University of Oklahoma by Brown (1999a) found that physicists and astronomers used citations at the end of articles (94 per cent), retrospective searching of indexing/abstracting tools (56 per cent), personal communication (50 per cent) and browsing older volumes (19 per cent). Eighty-one per cent of respondents in the field of physics/astronomy said that they photocopied the library's copy for obtaining journal articles, 75 per cent read the library's copy, 44 per cent used free electronic copy, the same percentage used interlibrary loans, 38 per cent had a personal subscription, and 19 per cent used the library's electronic subscriptions.…”

Integrating Information Literacy into the Science Curriculum

“…2,3 Despite the importance of monitoring the success of these programs, very few studies have addressed how any improvements achieved in information literacy can be measured. 4 One goal of this investigation was to devise an instrument for measuring information literacy using the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for…”

User Education and Information Literacy in Agricultural Universities of India

“…Another study by Brown (1999) revealed that information literacy programs helped students to assess themselves, helped students to be able successfully to determine the extent of information needed, access information effectively, evaluate critically and incorporate information into their knowledge basis and to use information effectively.…”