Student Success in the 21st Century:
Information Literacy, Key to the Information Society

The University of Minnesota has taken many steps to improve undergraduate education with our emphasis on smaller class sizes, through the writing intensive requirements, with the development of freshman seminars, by the increased number of senior faculty teaching freshmen, and planning for the Center for Freshman Studies. These improvements are significant, but will they ensure our graduates’ success in the 21^st Century? Are they preparing students to thrive in the Information Age?

The explosive growth of the Internet combined with annual quadrupling of information will define and drive the first decades of the 21^st Century. The Internet permeates every aspect of our lives and every profession and business. It has created a new frontier of immense opportunity as well as great risk. It has moved us from the dawn of the Information Age to the full-blown Information Society and Information Economy. The best and worst minds as well as most and least reputable organizations and business are now accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem.

By the time they graduate, our students have developed a well honed but finite set of information technology skills; they know how to use word processing programs, to communicate with e-mail and how to access the Internet. These skills alone are not enough. They do not equip students to use effectively the overwhelming amount of information now available. Increasingly faculty and instructors are limiting the number of Internet sources that can be used as sources for papers. In recent interviews and focus groups arranged by the University Libraries, faculty and teaching assistants complained of poor research papers and ill-prepared students. Students are taking most of their sources from the Internet and most are "not quality sources" or are "really questionable." One frustrated faculty admitted that he had no idea how to help his students sort out "the garbage" they find. Networked information and the Internet have fundamentally changed how information is found and used by University students. The traditional guarantors of information quality, such as faculty and librarians, are now easily by-passed, leaving the full responsibility of making quality information choices with the individual student.

Information literacy, a concept librarians and educators developed over the last decade, refers to a set of competencies students need to be effective information consumers and creators in the information society. These information literacy competencies include understanding the structure of information and knowledge, creating and executing strategies for finding the needed information, analyzing and evaluating the information, and synthesizing and integrating information so it can be used to complete an assignment or solve a problem. These competencies are essential to becoming a master student as well as to working and living successfully in an information society. They are the very skills needed for life-long learning.

If our students are to be information literate we must take deliberate and system-wide steps to integrate the development of information literacy competencies into the fabric of the undergraduate curriculum. Faculty and librarians, working together can prepare students to be effective users and creators of information. University Libraries is prepared to lead this effort, but it will require involvement by the whole University to insure a successful outcome, i.e. graduating successful students prepared to succeed in the 21^st Century.