Information Literacy Behaviours in a Large publicly funded University: A Case Study of Mahasarakham University, Thailand

Abstract

The aim of this research was to study the information literacy behaviours of the undergraduate students in Mahasarakham University. The results found that the main assigned types of tasks the students included class report presentation, verbal presentation on opinions in different issues and report on topics/outlines of the project study. The most practices of behaviours of students were an intention of seeking for information once or twice unless they would find proper study of topics. The accessibility of programs systems as tools applied by the students to search for the assignments of different subjects in the past six months was Internet programs access; Skype, Google search engine and online forums. The most topics in the past six months were news and current events. The more specific resources used by the students in daily life were the search engine programs such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. Regarding on all search processes from the assignment by advisor through handed-in papers, the difficulties provided from students’ opinions was found consisting of topic settings, relevance topics for study and the commencement of the assignment topic study. The topic papers determined by the students were assessed by the use of reference information before the assessment of the approved topics study was carried out. The results from the study of the information literacy upon behaviours of the undergraduate students depended largely on their personal habits in seeking knowledge through the resourceful search engines; mostly a well-known Google for class report presentations when the majority of their approval on an assessment for the topics study loaded with references as many as the resourceful classmates in daily life was determined at the highest levels.