Determining the Outcome of an Information Literacy Initiative for Postgraduate Students: A Case Study

Comprehensive, national efforts utilising technology in support of remote online learning and distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic are emerging and evolving rapidly, resulting in a need for information literacy training encompassing digital skills for both academic staff and tertiary students. Against this background, there is a paucity of studies that underscore outcomes-based assessment of information literacy training interventions within the higher education context. This chapter thus reports on an outcomes-based assessment of an information literacy workshop hosted for postgraduate students by a funding organisation. A quasi-experimental research design in which a comparison group was utilised to evaluate the outcome of the information literacy intervention was implemented. A paired-sample t-test was used to measure the knowledge increase while controlling for the influence of the comparison group using an independent sample t-test. Results indicated that the intervention had a statistically significant impact on information literacy. More specifically, a 6.01% increase in information literacy occurred which was statistically significant on the 95th percentile. The study supplements the corpus of knowledge by providing evidence of outcomes-based assessment within the South African higher education milieu, especially utilising a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test research design.