Senior High School (SHS) Information Literacy (IL) Skills Assessment Using the Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (TRAILS)

Abstract

 The study aimed to assess the information literacy (IL) skills of Grade 12 public Senior High School (SHS) students of seven (7) schools in the City of Santa Rosa, Laguna, during the first semester of SY 2018-2019. Assessment 1 of the Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (TRAILS) was answered by 313 students chosen through stratified random sampling using Cochran’s formula with a 0.05 margin of error. Utilizing the quantitative descriptive research design, five (5) IL skills categories under TRAILS were explored and given qualitative interpretation of Poor to Excellent. Statistical tools include frequency counts, median, mode, Shapiro-Wilk test, and Kruskal-Wallis H-Test. The study revealed that out of the five (5) IL skills categories, the students’ strength is evident under three (3) categories, and the combined scores of the students were at the lowest in one category – identifying potential sources. When grouped according to track, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Strand performed well with three categories having a qualitative analysis of Poor to Excellent. Accountancy, Business, and Management (ABM) Strand performed Poor to Good in four (4) IL Categories except for one. General Academic Strand (GAS) performed Poor to Excellent in two (2) categories and Poor to Average results under two (2) categories. Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL) Strand performed Poor to Excellent under one category; Poor to Average under two (2) categories, and, Poor to Good also under two (2) categories. There is a significant difference in the IL skills of the respondents when they are grouped according to track by IL category. The null hypothesis was rejected with a p-value of 0.000. It is concluded that the IL skills level of Grade 12 SHS students in the City of Santa Rosa, Laguna, is far from ideal. However, this must be viewed with caution for several reasons: the absence of a Philippine IL skills benchmark; the overall IL skills result was not correlated in any way with the absence or presence of IL literacy programs in the respective schools; the overall IL skills result was not also correlated with any IL skills training in junior high school or any other level before SHS; and no other method (e.g., interview, focus group discussion) was employed to confirm the assessment results. Building on the results and conclusions, the researcher proposed an IL program for the public SHSs of the City of Santa Rosa, Laguna.