Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods

Aim: To compare the effectiveness of an online information literacy tutorial with a face-to-face session for teaching information literacy skills to nurses. Design: Randomised control trial. Participants: Seventy-seven first year undergraduate pre-registration diploma nursing students. Intervention: Online in-house information literacy tutorial Comparison: One hour face-to-face session, covering the same material as the intervention, delivered by the nursing subject librarian. Methods: Search histories were scored using a validated checklist covering keyword selection, Boolean operators, truncation and synonyms. Skills retention was measured at 1 month using the same checklist. Inferential statistics were used to compare search skills within and between groups pre and post-session. Results: The searching skills of first year pre-registration nursing students improve following information literacy sessions (p<0.001), and remain unchanged 1 month later, regardless of teaching method. The two methods produce a comparable improvement (p=0.263). There is no improvement or degradation of skills 1 month post-session for either method (p=0.216). Conclusion: Nurses Information literacy skills improve after both face-to-face and online instruction. There is no skills degradation at 1 month post-intervention for either method. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.