Is there an Information Literacy Gap to Be Bridged?

One word:    Yes.

Today I am reading:

DaCosta, J.W. (2010) Is there an information literacy skills gap to be bridged? An examination of faculty perceptions and activities relating to information literacy in the United States and England. College and research libraries, 71(3), 203-222.

"English faculty....placed a greater emphasis on student's ability to access and retrieve information and less on the ability to recognize the information need." (204)

This is odd to me, it seems that at the college level we ought to be teaching students to analyze and recognize the types of information they need.  College is all about higher order thinking. We would be doing a disservice to students if we only provided them with the basic skills for finding information without also informing them how to evaluate the information that they find.

"The research confirmed that faculty expected information literacy skills to be largely acquired through what Clair McGuinness describes as "osmosis.""

This is surprising to me. I suspect that most professors probably had at least some research training from a librarian.  Did they forget?  I suspect that for faculty, as for librarians, research skills and habits become so ingrained that we forget that they are learned skills.

"Students demonstrate the use of a coping mechanism rather than an information strategy"

Interesting. I have seen this in action, students will go to Google and find anything that remotely relates to their topics, sometimes stretching a source to make it relate.  This, instead of planning out which information sources and keywords will locate resources that are directly relevant to their topics.  This type of information panic could be alleviated with instruction about subject specific resources and constructing a Boolean search strategy.

The conclusion?  Yes, there is a gap between how important faculty thinks information literacy is (very) and what they are actively doing to promote literacy (not so much).  Dacosta suggests, and I concur, that in order to close this gap, librarians need to promote information literacy services to faculty and administrators, and to give them examples of how embedded or collaborative information literacy can be successful.