COLLECTIVE INFORMATION LITERACY SKILLS OF STUDENT GROUPS DURING COLLECTIVE INFORMATION-SEEKING PROCESS IN RURAL VOCATIONAL TRAINING INSTITUTIONS

This study aims to investigate the Collective Information Literacy (IL) skills of student groups in selected public and private vocational training institutions (VTI) in Tanzania’s rural settings. Specifically, the study seeks to evaluate the informational literacy (IL) training students’ groups receive for engaging in collective information seeking (CIS) in vocational educational training (VET) institutions in rural library settings and propose an appropriate model that improves the collective information seeking behavior of students’ groups in rural libraries at VTI in Tanzania. Karunakaran, Spence, and Reddy's (2013) model anchored to conduct this study. The population of the study comprised selected VET students in Tanzania’s rural settings. A purposive sampling technique was used to select the study participants. Specifically, the proposed study used convenience sampling to select VET students for inclusion in focus group discussions and interviews. The data for the study was collected through the use of observation, interviews and focus group discussions. Qualitative data was analysed through thematic analysis. The thematic analysis helped to develop different themes relating to the specific objectives of this study. IL skills were found to be the cross-cutting process among all VET students’ groups during CIS. VET students’ groups could not get the collective information requirements in the absence of IL skills, as it was mentioned by 17 respondents (90%). However, the application of other information-searching techniques is not familiar to VET student groups, like Boolean operators and truncation. Lack of IL skills among VET students’ groups triggered by failure to retrieve complete required information to meet the collective information requirements for accomplishing the groups’ assignments given. Lack of IL skills among VET students’ groups on how to evaluate the sources of information on the internet and evaluating the massive retrieved information were the common aspects across all VET students’ groups of different professionalism.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0786/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>