Use It or Lose It? A Longitudinal Performance Assessment of Undergraduate Business Students' Information Literacy

At a large, public, Midwestern, American university, business librarians teach a required, one-credit information literacy course geared towards lower-division students in the school of management. In order to determine the lasting effects of the course, a longitudinal study of individual students' performance on three pre/post-test surveys was conducted across a set of management courses. The first course, a required information literacy class, was generally taken in the lower-division. The second course, a career strategies course, is generally taken after the first information literacy class. Students who took both required courses displayed greater information literacy knowledge and skills than students who took only the second course. Students retained the information uniformly over time, as time between the two courses did not yield a significant difference in scores. These findings show that information literacy courses have a lasting impact on lower-division students as they progress through a college program.