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GOOD NEWS  The overall attitude of students towards Information skills was positive as evidenced by the NEMP survey. They enjoyed the tasks and most were interested in gathering information. Students knew and were confident about where to locate information from catalogues and reference books. The majority of year 8 students had considerable success on alphabetical ordering tasks.

Student progress from year 4 to year 8 was substantial — particularly in locating information.

Students can locate relevant information when text is well organised and explicit.

Where students had background knowledge on a topic, they found it easier to ask relevant questions. This was particularly evident on computer-based information finding tasks.

CONCERNS
As indicated in the summary on page 11 of the report, “The most important message emerging from the framework is that students possessing well developed information skills can perform three main tasks effectively: clarifying information needs and formulating good questions, finding and gathering information that is relevant to the questions, and then analysing and use that information to answer the questions. A substantial proportion of the intellectual demands occur during the first and third of these tasks: finding information is clearly important, but its value is greatly dependent on the extent to which it can be validly interpreted and used to answer important questions.”

Student performance indicates that there needs to be more emphasis for teacher development on these key areas:

a. defining information need and asking contextualised questions;

b. using the information analytically to answer questions.

Performance on tasks requiring analysis and classification of information suggests that students still need to bring thinking skills to bear on such tasks.

Where students lacked background knowledge their ability to ask appropriate and thoughtful questions was compromised.

There is a danger that teachers confuse students’ demonstrated confidence with computers with their ability to retrieve and analyse information.

Student perception of computers as the one stop shop for information is not backed up by students’ ability to retrieve and use information.

GENERAL
The study confirms the rationale (page 10 of report) that while information skills are integral to all curriculum areas, unless they are a conscious focus for teaching and monitoring, they tend to slip between the cracks.

Information skills are described differently in each of the curriculum statements. This NEMP report, and particularly the framework on page 11, provides necessary coherence and an overview which gives direction for teacher development and school planning.

If we are to develop students with adequate information literacy skills, a summary chart of the essential skills, exemplified by the NEMP framework, should be integral to the implementation of each individual curriculum statement.

Girls did better than boys on one third of the tasks. The high relationship between socio-economic levels and achievement was confirmed in this report.