Developing information literacy: a key to evidence-based nursing.
This report describes the evaluation of a curriculum-integrated programme designed to help students develop an awareness of the nursing literature, the skills to locate and retrieve it, and skills required in its evaluation; in other words'information literacy'. Positive changes in student performance on objective measures of information-literacy skills were revealed as well as a significant increase in the levels of confidence of the student in performing those skills. Students who had undertaken the information-literacy programme ('programme' students) performed better on a range of objective measures of information literacy, as well as reporting higher levels of confidence in these skills, than students who had not participated in the programme ('non-programme' students). Evaluation of this programme provides evidence of the potential usefulness of a curriculum-integrated approach for the development of information-literacy skills within nursing education. With these underlying skills, students will be better equipped to consolidate and extend their key information-literacy skills to include research appreciation and application. These are vital for effective lifelong learning and a prerequisite to evidence-based practice.
Shorten
A
A
Lecturer Department of Nursing, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. allison_shorten@uow.edu.au
Wallace
M C
MC
Crookes
P A
PA
D004506:Education, Nursing; D004521:Educational Measurement; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D009517:New South Wales; D015397:Program Evaluation; D012647:Self-Assessment; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods