Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
10-1-2020
Document Type
Article
Abstract
The study attempted to find out whether undergraduates’ subject background has influence on their application of digital literacy skills in accessing digital information for educational problem solving.The design of the Ex- Post Facto survey was used for the study. A37- item Questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 1506, which represented 5% of 30,121 undergraduates of seven federal universities in southern Nigeria, which were purposely selected for the study. The major finding of the study showed that subject background had strong influence and makes the difference in undergraduates’ ability to use digital literacy skills in accessing information. The direction of the difference is that those in science-related disciplines demonstrated greater skills than those in Arts- related fields in the application of digital literacy skills for information access. The major challenge was lack of adequate education and training for developing digital literacy skills among undergraduates. It was recommended among others, that the National Universities Commission (NUC) should formulate policies that would enforce university-wide training of undergraduates, especially those in Arts/Humanities for digital literacy skills development.