The Role of the Faculty in Information Literacy Instruction

This paper presents an extract from the cross sectional study conducted at the University of Lusaka to assess the information literacy of skills of students. Information literacy has been found to be the necessary skill for students at the tertiary level of education. This has been necessitated by the advancement in technology coupled with the exponential growth of information, both physical and in digital format, which demands that students should have necessary competencies for them to effectively, and efficiently access, use and share the information to solve problems and create new knowledge.
The study adopted a mixed method research approach. The survey design was used for data collection. The survey followed a cross-sectional approach and employed questionnaires as instruments of data collection. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), Version 16, was used for data analysis. The study population was made up of full-time university students from all the five faculties of the university. These were the faculties of Law, Business, Education, Social Sciences & Technology (ESST), Health Sciences and Graduate Studies. The sample size of One hundred students were sampled using the proportional stratified random sampling. The findings from the study revealed that the students faced challenges to find the required information in the library. The challenges included their inability to access the needed information, synthesise their work and provide references. The findings were attributed to many factors which included the lack of a systematic approach information literacy skills.