A Profile of Digital Information Literacy Competencies of High School Students

Introduction Information Seeking styles have changed over the past few years with the evolution of the Internet and on-line resources. This has resulted in the evolution of new learning methods and information literacy strategies. This paper has evolved as part of the suite of studies for the project entitled Digital Curriculum Literacies (Freebody, Hedberg & Guo, 2003) conducted at the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This paper will explore the digital Information literacy strategies and cognitive processes of these high school students. It will also to some extent illustrate the search patterns of these students. The Digital curricular Literacies project (DCL) focuses on the key initiatives of the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) on the use of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) in school learning. The term Digital Curriculum Literacies refers to the integrated use of ICTs within the various curriculum areas. The project is a suite of three studies. The general questions of this research suite are: DCL I: How do teachers guide students in their ICT-related project work through their classroom interactions? How can that guidance be improved? DCL II: How do students engage in on-line tasks? How can that be improved? DCL III: How do students construct and craft their assessable ICT-related projects? How can the linguistic/textual and multimodal features of those outcomes be improved? This paper comes out of DCL II study, which looked at some of the students' online usage skills. When they worked on Internet-based tasks how they navigated and searched for information, what were the strategies used and how did they integrate and synthesize information into an artifact? In a related study, (Barab, Bowdish, & Lawless, 1997), the researchers used a multidimensional computer-based kiosk and the individuals could select the type of task undertaken thus making it difficult to determine which aspects of navigational performance resulted from the influence of the choice of tasks. This present study sought to overcome some of the limitations of these studies by utilizing a Web-based search and navigational task which was directly linked to the curriculum being taught and was not constrained by resources nor the strategies that could be employed in working with the resources. Defining Digital Information Literacy Doyle's (1994) has succinctly defined information literacy as the ability to access, evaluate, and use information from a variety of sources in meaningful ways. However some researchers have disagreed with such a simple and all-encompassing characterization of information literacy. From early times of its conceptualization, information literacy has been recognized to be complex and multi-faceted (Bawden, 2001). True information literacy is multi-faceted as it calls upon the combination of a rich variety of skills and knowledge (McClure, 1994; Taylor, 1986). Tuckett (1989) breaks down this multi-faceted dimension of information literacy into a hierarchy of three levels of skills in the following ascending order of complexity: * Simple information skills. Using a single information tool * Compound information skills. Combining simple information skills/tools * Complex/integrated information skills. Making use of a variety of information networks, evaluating and repackaging information In the current digital age, information literacy has inevitably been influenced extensively by developments in technology. Thus the term digital literacy or digital information literacy has emerged prominently. Digital information literacy can be defined as the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of networked computer sources and it involves the skill of deciphering multimedia images, sounds and text (Gilster, 1997; Lanham, 1995). …