Assessment of Information Literacy Skills of Students

The 21st century is called as an information era, as information plays a vital role in the lives of individuals and is considered to be the most demanding commodity. This era has witnessed the phenomena of information explosion,information flood, information overload, data smog etc. with the release of too much information, the results of which caused barriers in our lives. Information Literacy is the only solution to this problem which provides skills to know when we need information and where to locate it effectively and efficiently. A present study is a part of the M.Phil dissertation, was done to assess the information literacy of chemical science students, to know their knowledge about information search skills in various environments, and to develop an information Literacy module for these students. Questionnaires were used as a data collection tool and these are distributed to the first year and second year students of the Chemistry Department, University of Pune. 170 questionnaires were distributed among these students. Out of 170 students 130 students gave response to the questionnaire. These 130 respondents became the sample for the present study.