Needs Assessment of Community College Students

Althea Lazzaro

LIS 560

Introduction

Teaching information literacy to community college students offers a number of exciting challenges to the information professional. Community college students, as a population, are impossible to generalize into any one type. They range from students that are still in high school, getting a head start on a four-year education to mature students who have been out of school since before the Internet came into wide use. In many ways, an incoming class of community college students are just like any batch of college freshman or sophomores: they have come to the college to learn, be challenged and acquire new skills. In other ways, though, they represent a mix of skills, motivations and abilities that set them apart from a typical class at an average four-year institution.

As information professionals, we have a vested interest in learning how to teach effective information literacy and research skills to community college students of all kinds. According to the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), “community colleges are the largest, fastest growing sector of higher education” (as qtd. in Ragains, 2006, p. 53). The AACC further notes that community colleges currently serve “close to half of all undergraduate students in the United States” (2010). Because community colleges offer comprehensive education in the liberal arts, sciences and trades, at a tuition that is significantly more manageable than most four-year institutions, it is part of their mission, and their challenge, to provide equitable training to all students who come to them.

Traits and Characteristics

While we can’t pinpoint an “average” community college student, a number of statistics give insight into the educational preparedness and goals of the community college population. Fifty-two percent of community college students are the first in their family to attend college (Ragains, 2006, p. 54). According to the AACC, the average age of community college students is 29 years old (2010). This number represents students who are taking classes while still in high school, students who have gone back to school after having worked for a number of years and students who have retired and are taking classes purely for enrichment. In terms of their obligations outside of school, “60% are part-time students, 57% work at least 20 hours a week, and 30% care for independents” (Fry, 2009, p. 41). According to Cohen, author of The American Community College “the majority of students entering open-door community colleges come from the lower half of the high school classes, academically and socioeconomically” (Fry, 2009, p. 40).

I don’t want too rely to heavily on these statistics to say anything concrete, but, in keeping with the literature on the information seeking behavior of community college students, the numbers suggest a student population that arrives at the community college without all the advantages of technology, or the luxury of single-minded intellectual pursuit, for a variety of reasons. Older students report feeling unequipped to navigate fully electronic catalogs and databases for their research, in part because their formative library experiences involved paper-based finding aids that no longer exist in many academic libraries (Groce, 2008). Younger students may or may not have had access to up to date technology in their schools but they have grown up with the assumption that they can find abundant and accurate information online, independent from formal library sources.[1] Data on students’ obligations outside of school indicate that whatever their desire to learn, there are many pressing concerns, like dependant children or a full time job, that make patient, careful library research seem out of their grasp (Groce, 2008).

Information Seeking Behavior

In her review of the literature on the information behavior of community college students, Leanna Fry persuasively argues that available studies and statistics that relate solely to the community college are shoddy, small-scale and poorly conducted. Many of the findings of current studies conflict and contradict, and rely largely on the interviews with library staff rather than surveys of students (2009). That being said, a few trends emerged clearly from a number of studies. It seems that students who are relatively technologically savvy still have a very hard time evaluating the authority of the material that they gather for papers and assignments. Moreover, many students, independent of age, are unaware of the resources available through their library, and unequipped to judge what type of material they need for a particular assignment (e.g. struggling through a pile of articles, when a general book would be easier to use and more to the point [Groce, 2008]). Unfortunately, all of these challenges are compounded by widespread library anxiety that deters students from learning about resources that would be useful to them (Karas and Green, 2007).

Needs and Skills

When students are inducted to the library in the typical 50-minute session, they report having a hard time grasping all of the new information that they are shown, and library training that is combined with a class seems to be more effective for long-term retention of research concepts (Karas and Green, 2007). So, I would suggest a hierarchy of needs and skills to be addressed sequentially throughout a class or assignment to assure that students have a working familiarity and comfort with the information available to them in the library, and how to use that information effectively and efficiently once they’ve accessed it. The over-arching need of most students is the successful completion of a school assignment that involves research.

But under that general need are a multitude of smaller needs that must be met to achieve the overall goal. The first part of the research process for many students is the need to gather sources for their assignment. Students must amass at least preliminary information about their topic and to do this, they must be able to navigate several different systems to find items, and then be able to actually acquire those items once they’ve found their references or records. To meet this need, student must learn the following skills:

Skill: how to navigate the College’s OPAC;
Skill: how to effectively search the Internet;
Skill: how to search scholarly databases using keyword and controlled vocabulary searches;

Skill: navigate the physical and electronic space of the library’s collection to find a book, find the full text of an article, print and photocopy;
Skill: how to articulate the assignment, information need and any research problems to library staff.[2]

Once a student has gathered citations, found some books, talked to a librarian about why a database is so hard to use, and emailed themselves a couple of websites, she has to evaluate her sources. As indicated by the generation Y statistics, this proves to be a major problem for young students, in particular, who tend to trust Internet sources too readily, and gather in-depth articles on their topic, when a book that offers an overview would be easier and more appropriate (Groce, 2008). The second major need, then, is the ability to evaluate the material that they have gathered for authority, scope and appropriateness for the assignment. To meet this need, student must learn the following skills:

Skill: how to fact-check and evaluate the validity of Internet resources;
Skill: how to determine if an article is peer-reviewed;
Skill: how to choose between searching for a more general book or a more focused article;
Skill: how to follow citations from a bibliography and do known-item searches in the OPAC and in scholarly databases.

The challenge of an information literacy curriculum that aims to address the needs and skills outlined above is to make that curriculum interesting and relevant to students who are internet savvy and to students who have a deep discomfort with information technologies. As several studies have shown, even those students who have confidence in their ability to search the Internet for information have a lot to learn about the reliability and authority of their sources. With assignment-relevant, challenging, humorous and compassionate instruction, it is possible to successfully meet the needs and skills outlined above to great effect on the path to developing successful, confident students.

Bibliography

American Association of Community Colleges. (2010). Students at community

colleges. American Association of Community Colleges. Retrieved from http://www.aacc.nche.edu/AboutCC/Trends/Pages/studentsatcommunityc olleges.aspx.

Fry, L. (2009). Information behavior of community college students: A survey of

literature. Community and Junior College Libraries, 15 (1), 39-50.

Godwin, P. and Parker, J. (Eds.) (2008). Information literacy meets library 2.0.

London: Facet Publishing.

Groce, H. (2008). Information-seeking habits and information literacy of

community and junior college students: A review of literature.

Community and Junior College Libraries 13 (3), 191-199.

Johnson, W. (2010). Developing an information literacy action plan.

Community and Junior College Libraries, 15 (4), 212-216.

Karas, M. and Green, R. (2007). The information needs and information-seeking

behaviors of community college and lower-division undergraduate

students. Community and Junior College Libraries, 14 (2), 103-109.

Ragains, P. (Ed.) (2006). Information literacy that works: A guide to teaching by

discipline and student population. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers.

[1] In a study conducted by Kate Manuel on the attitude of Generation Y students toward information on the internet, “63% believed that using the web was the most efficient way to find information, and 28% believed ‘a Central Internet Authority review[ed] all Web information for its accuracy’” (Fry, 2009, p. 47).

[2] The results of a study conducted by Anna Van Scoyoc on library anxiety showed that interactions with library staff “did more to relieve anxiety than computer-assisted instruction” (Karas and Green, 2007, p.105). This would suggest that while online tutorials may be helpful, in-person staff-student instruction is also an essential part of bibliographic instruction.