Information Literacy Competencies in Secondary Schools in Kenya

Abstract

The knowledge economy is marked by an increasing need for information skills at all levels including schools, universities, workplace and ordinary life. Therefore, education stakeholders should campaign for the teaching of information literacy skills at all levels of learning since they are life skills. The state of information literacy competencies among secondary school students in Kenya has not been adequately investigated to determine their prowess. Therefore, this study was aimed at assessing information literacy competencies among secondary school students using Nakuru County as a study site. The study was premised on the Big6 Skills information literacy theory. The study was based on a pragmatic paradigm where both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted. Simple random sampling was used to draw teacher and student respondents while purposive sampling was used to select school/teacher librarians from the targeted population which comprised of 288 teachers, 1785 students and 12 school/teacher librarians from 12 sampled schools. This resulted to a sample size of 266 teachers, 1189 students and 12 school/teacher librarians. Data was collected using questionnaires and interview guide. Statistical Packages for Social Sciences was used to analyse quantitative data while thematic analysis was used for qualitative data. The findings of the study indicate that most of secondary students in Nakuru County were not information literate. They relied on teachers to help them understand class assignments. The study concludes that teaching information literacy skills to secondary school students may lead to effective and efficient use of school libraries and flourish educational achievements hence turn around the dwindling standards of our educational sector. The study recommends that information professionals should be in the forefront in advocating for the inclusion of information literacy at all levels of education and for the incorporation of information literacy in the secondary schools’ curriculum. It also recommends for teacher-librarian collaboration in planning information literacy issues. Therefore, information literacy should be included in the university curriculum in order to equip graduate teachers with these requisite skills which they will in turn inculcate to secondary school students. Finally, the study recommends for an IL programme to institutionalize information literacy in secondary schools.