The development and evaluation of a socio-culturally appropriate information literacy programme for journalism and mass communication students at the National Open University of Nigeria

This research study explored the information literacy practices and perspectives of staff and students within the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of the National Open University in Nigeria with the purpose of developing and evaluating a subject-specific and socio-culturally appropriate information literacy instructional programme for students. Previous research in this area within the context of Nigeria, has focused mainly on assessing students' information literacy skills, librarians' perceptions of information literacy and the challenges and barriers affecting the provision of information literacy within higher institutions in Nigeria. However, to-date no work has considered developing an information literacy instruction that is socio-culturally appropriate for students within the Nigerian higher education context. This research adopted the use of discipline-specific information literacy competency standards (Association of College and Research Libraries Information Literacy Competency Standard for Journalism students and professionals), the principles of the sociocultural perspective on information literacy and the ideas of critical information literacy to design and develop a subject-specific information literacy instructional package. An action research design with an embedded mixed-methods approach was followed, which included a) a qualitative action research diagnosis stage, consisting of running the information literacy instructional package within two Journalism and Mass Communication programmes, conducting semi-structured interviews with seven journalism and mass communication academics and analysing the information literacy related content of course descriptors from 14 courses and b) a quantitative data collection and analysis phase, which included conducting a questionnaire survey with students to examine their information literacy skills before (121 students) and after (110 students) the delivery of the instruction and evaluate its design and effectiveness. The findings from the qualitative phase revealed academics perceptions of information literacy and the existing information literacy gaps within postgraduate journalism and mass communication students' course descriptors. The quantitative phase findings (action research evaluation) revealed that students felt more competent after going through the new information literacy programme with positive evaluation outcomes on the design, content and structure of the information literacy instruction.