Undergraduate information literacy self-efficacy: a cross-sectional study of Cambodian provincial universities

Introduction

Information literacy is ‘the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning’ (ACRL, 2016). With the recent rapid increase in the availability of information through information and communication technologies, information literacy is becoming a pervasive need in modern education. Its effects are not limited on the individual level where it impacts academic performance and modernizes one’s lifestyle, but also on a macro scale where combining technological improvements with the population’s information literacy skills helps in increasing the social and economic development as well as the political empowerment of a country.

Cambodia is a country located in South East Asia that can greatly benefit from a highly information literate population. After almost 30 years since the end of a devastating civil war, the Royal Government of Cambodia has been focusing on capacity building that could lead to regional and global integration equality through the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (Cambodia. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, 2004). One of the government’s thrusts is improving the country’s technology infrastructure to be at par with its neighbours. This is still a work in progress; according to Elwood and MacLean (2009) Cambodia ranked eighth among the ten countries in the Association of South-East Asian Nations region in terms of its infrastructure. The country set its goal to fully integrate the use of technology in the education curriculum by 2015 for both province- and city-based universities (Cambodia. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, 2004).

The progress observed in the capital, however, is not evident in the provinces. Cambodian provincial universities offer few technology courses which are limited to developing basic computer skills. Richardson found that in seven rural provinces in Cambodia, only 10.4% of the schools had computers for teaching and learning. He also found that 15.6% of the schools never allowed their students to access the computers (Richardson, 2006). Students who are more motivated to develop technology skills have to spend their own money and seek training outside the university. Because of the additional costs, these extra-curricular activities are inaccessible to poor families.

In recent years, the use of technology for gathering information had been steadily becoming more common and educational. Information and communication technologies are a core and central part of the modern era, and their fast development is changing the way people execute, organize, work and learn (Hatlevik and Hatlevik, 2018). Information skills nowadays are important for the organizations, professional performance and workflows (Keshavarz et al., 2016). While information literacy can be argued to be different from competency in technology use, it is revealed that the computer literacy and information literacy skills support each other (Keshavarz et al., 2017). While the information can be accessible even with minimal technology use, the recent rapid changes and rapid growth in the amount of information available on the Internet, it has become crucial for educated individuals to be technologically competent for full information literacy.

The lack of access to technology can naturally decrease the students’ confidence in their ability to use technology. Having information literacy self-efficacy can enable students to use their information literacy skills effectively (Kokic and Novosel, 2014; Usluel, 2007) and better assess their knowledge and areas for improvement in terms of technology use (Kurbanoglu, 2009). Self-efficacy is defined as ‘an individual’s self-perception concerning his own capacity to organize and actualize required actions to reach a pre-set performance’ (Bandura, 1977). Self-efficacy can be instilled by teachers on to their students (Zinn, 2013). When combined with self-motivation, self-efficacy can have a great impact on academic achievement (Bandura, 1997; Walliman, 2011).

There are several factors that come into play in information literacy and self-efficacy research. One factor is the effect of sex in information literacy, where the current literature shows contradictory results: some conclude that sex does not influence information literacy (Ode, 2017) while others indicate that sex is not a differentiating factor (Ozoemelem, 2010). Another factor that is commonly investigated when tackling information literacy self-efficacy is the student’s academic year. However, a recurring but surprising result is that a student’s academic year is not a differentiating factor (Angrist and Lavy, 2002; Danner and Pessu, 2017), which can be contrary to the common-sense belief that people improve their skills as with the length of education at the university (Gunn and Miree, 2012). Finally, several researchers have investigated the effect of the faculties’ knowledge/ability in the development of information literacy self-efficacy of undergraduate students as a key outcome for college students, and needs to be included as requirements for information skills in order to see the effectiveness of the integration of information literacy into general education and disciplinary education (Dhanesar, 2006; McInnis-Bowers et al., 2009; Salleh et al., 2011; Thompson, 2002). In this research, we also propose that it is important to take a more macro approach. Several decisions that can affect information literacy elf-efficacy development such as available infrastructure and infrastructure funding at least at the university level. Hence, we also intend to investigate the effects on universities.

Understanding the circumstances surrounding provincial universities in Cambodia, the acknowledgement that the current undergraduate students can dictate the progress of their country in the future, and the need for strong information literacy self-efficacy for nation-building, it is paramount to have a clear understanding of their undergraduate students’ abilities. The purpose of this study is to examine how Cambodia undergraduate students at provincial universities perceive their information literacy self-efficacy, and to determine whether there are significant differences in information literacy self-efficacy in terms of sex, academic year, faculty and university. To this end, the following research questions were formulated:

1. What is the level of information literacy self-efficacy of Cambodia’s undergraduate students in the provincial universities?
2. Do undergraduate students in the three provincial Cambodian universities differ in their information literacy self-efficacy according to sex, academic year, faculty and university?

Research methods

Research participants

The research was conducted in Cambodia during the 2018 academic year and involved 1,009 undergraduate students from three public universities located in different provinces of Cambodia. Researchers received permission from the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport and the management of each university. The respondents were from different bachelor programmes– including Business Administration and Tourism, Institute of Foreign Language, Science and Technology, Agriculture and Food Processing and Art, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Questionnaire details

The information literacy self-efficacy skills scale has been used widely by researchers in the field. There are other questionnaires available for measuring information literacy self-efficacy, but most of them are tailored for specific functions (e.g., lifelong learning, information literacy in the workplace, etc.) (Ahmad et al., 2019; Hee et al., 2019). We needed a generalized measure that could be easily used by the students; hence we chose this questionnaire. The twenty-eight item questionnaire was stated to be highly reliable indicator and is appropriate in length (Kurbanoglu et al., 2006). It is recommended for identifying people with low self-efficacy and thus, well-matched to the Cambodian context. The questionnaire was translated into the Khmer language, and a pilot test was conducted to verify that the translated questionnaire fitted the Cambodian context before the actual pre-testing. The pilot test was conducted by distributing the translated questionnaire to fifteen students from different universities. The students’ opinion on the questionnaire was solicited afterwards. The students found each item in the questionnaire to be understandable, hence no further changes were made.

In a previous study, the items were originally measured with a seven-point Likert scale, anchored with notations from 1 = almost never true to 7 = almost always true. These options were reduced to 5 points (from 1 = strongly not confident to 5 = strongly confident) for simplicity.

Data collection

The questionnaires were printed and distributed to 1,152 participants. However, only 1,009 participants responded. It took the respondents an average of twenty-five minutes to complete the entire questionnaire. Unfortunately, 30% of the questionnaires were incomplete, and were discarded. See Table 1 below for the detailed demographics of participants in the study.

Statistical analysis

The data analysis in this study involved descriptive analysis to address the first research question, and inferential statistics using independent sample t-test (t-test) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to answer the second research question. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 21 was used for all data analysis. The responses were first analysed using principal components analysis) with varimax rotation method to identify meaningful subsets or components of the questionnaire. The relevant items were reduced to twenty-four items and recalculating the loadings and reliability of the items in the scale resulted in three components explaining 64.65% of the total variance. These components are relabelled as follows: information literacy skills for research production, information handling skills; and skills in using library resources. The resulting components and factors explain 64.65% of the total variance. Cronbach reliability coefficients of the three components were as follows: information literacy skills for research production = 0.95, information handling skills = 0.93 and skills in using library resources = 0.92. The Cronbach reliability coefficient for all items was found to be 0.97, suggesting good internal consistency.

Research results

The findings obtained will be addressed in the order of the questions in the study.

What is the level of information literacy self-efficacy of Cambodia’s undergraduate students in the provincial universities?

Undergraduate students' information literacy self-efficacy is quite low with mean values falling below the midpoint score 2.50 for all three components. Their mean score of self-efficacy ranged from a low of 2.22 (information handling skills) to a high as 2.36 (skills in using library resources). All succeeding tables show the percentage and frequency of Likert responses for each questionnaire item.

For the evaluation of the results, response rating 1 and 2 are considered as ‘not confident’ while response rating 4 and 5 in counted are considered as ‘confident’. Table 3 shows that 70.7% of the respondents were not confident in using Internet search tools (such as search engines, directories, etc.). Most of the respondents (63.4%) were also not confident in their ability to interpret visual information (i.e., graphs, tables, diagrams), identify points of agreement and disagreement among different sources (63.2%), evaluate various Internet sources of information (62%) and limit search strategies by subject, language and date (61.3%).

Overall, the level of the subscale of respondents with information literacy skills needed for undertaking research was very low in all subscales: only 17% of the respondents were confident in selecting information most appropriate to the information I need, while 48.9% of them were not confident. Analysis of mean values revealed that undergraduate students are highly confident when it comes to the responses learn from my information and problem-solving experience and improved my information literacy skill at a confidence rate of 23.6% (mean = 2.67, SD = 1.11). Generally, we may conclude that the respondents lack confidence in understanding the information, identifying a variety of potential sources of information, preparing a bibliography, making citations and use quotations within the text, and deciding where and how to find the information.

Table 4 shows that 68.9% of the respondents were not confident in determining the authority, reliability and timeliness of their information sources. Furthermore, most of the respondents (68.7%) were not confident in using many resources at the same time to conduct research, choosing a format (i.e. written, oral, visual) which is appropriate to communicate with the audience (i.e. students, colleagues) (64.7%).

Overall, the level in the sub-topics with information handling skills achievement items have scored very low in all sub-scales. For instance, only 11.3% of the respondents answered all the items related to content (i.e. introduction, conclusion) of a presentation (written, oral) as being either confident or strongly confident Table 4 also shows that the highest mean was on the respondent’s confidence in creating bibliographic records and organizing the bibliography (11.8%) (mean = 2.26, SD = 1.02). Generally, we may conclude that the respondents lack confidence in synthesizing newly gathered information from previous information and criticizing the quality of the process used to search for information and its products.

Table 5 shows that 68.9% of the respondents were not confident in using different kinds of libraries. Furthermore, most of the respondents were not confident in using many resources at the same time to conduct research (59.1%).

Overall, the respondents’ skill level in using library resources scored very low in all sub-scales: only 14% of respondents rated the item locate resources in the library using the library catalogue as strongly confident or confident, while 60.7% of them were not confident (strongly not confident or not confident). Table 5 also shows that the highest mean was on the respondent’s confidence in locating information sources in the library, where (17.3%) expressed confidence (mean = 2.58, SD = 1.01). Generally, we may conclude that the respondents lack confidence in using the library catalogue.

Do undergraduate students in the three provincial Cambodian universities differ in their information literacy self-efficacy according to sex, academic year, faculty and university?

Table 6 describes the results when data is compared across the sexes. No significant mean score differences were observed for Component 1 information literacy skills for research production, Component 2 information handling skills and Component 3 skills in using library resources.

Table 7 shows the respondents’ information literacy self-efficacy according to academic year. The results of the t-test reveal that there were no significant differences in the mean score of all sub-factors variable attributes analysed.

Table 8 describes the results for each factor when compared across faculty groups. Interestingly, significant mean scores differences were observed for all the three factors.

Post-hoc comparison using the Tukey honest significant difference test indicated further the pairwise comparison between these mean scores (Table 9). Certain pairwise comparisons showed statistical significance. In all the three factors, the Business Administration and Tourism faculty students always show significantly higher self-efficacy than those from the Art, Humanities, and Social Sciences faculties.

Table 10 describes the results when comparing universities concerning different faculties, where significant mean score differences were observed for all parameters.

Post-hoc comparison using the Tukey honest significant difference test indicated further the pairwise comparison between these mean scores (Table 11). Certain pairwise comparisons showed statistical significance. In all factors, students from University C always showed statistically lower values in terms of self-efficacy than students from Universities A and B.

Discussions and implications

The intersection between information literacy and culture

Information literacy, as we know it, is largely influenced by the Western culture with the definition itself posited by researchers in the West (Dorner and Gorman, 2006). Additionally, since the context of our research is on provincial higher education systems in Cambodia, the analysis that we are to make should take into consideration the culture since local context encompasses the entire educational system (Dorner and Gorman, 2011). Dorner and Gorman conducted a study on the intersection of culture and information literacy in Laos, another Southeast Asian country that is very similar in terms of economy and culture with Cambodia.

Power distance is a cultural characteristic where members of a group are cognizant about the imbalance of power within their group (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). Laos is a culture with high power distance; this means that Laotians put emphasis on power inequalities. This power distance can also be seen in the results of our research: students got the lowest score for the factor information handling skills, which includes questioning the authority of information sources. Cambodian undergraduate students are culturally conditioned to follow figures of authority, which could lead them to be less scrutinizing about their information sources.

Femininity is a cultural characteristic where members of a group suppose that the roles of the sexes overlap significantly (Hofstede and Hofstede, 2005). While people in Cambodia might perceive that their society is masculine, the study by Dorner and Gorman (2011) indicated that the similar Lao culture is actually feminine. This is also exhibited in our results: a person’s sex is not a significant factor in terms of information literacy of undergraduate students in Cambodia.

In making recommendations, we must consider that Asians in general are seen to have a collectivist culture. This is also reinforced by Dorner and Gorman’s study (2011) on the Lao culture. Collectivism refers to the cultural characteristic where members of a group expect to have strong cohesive ties with their in-groups. This means that recommendations

Low information literacy self-efficacy and curriculum perspective

Provincial university undergraduate students' information literacy self-efficacy was quite low, as the mean values fall below the midpoint score of 2.50 for all the three components. The mean score of information handling skills was at the lowest value of 2.22, while the highest score of 2.36 was obtained with skills in using library resources. Moreover, the information literacy skills for research production was determined to be 2.35, as fairly stayed between the two optimum values. The Cambodia Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (2004) stated that only 6% of lower secondary and 35% of upper secondary had between one and two computers available to them, and these resources are mostly restricted to administrative purposes only. Only eight upper secondary schools had more than ten computers. In seven rural provinces in Cambodia, information technological infrastructure is low and Cambodia’s education system needs improvement and expansion, as cited in Richardson (2006). This problem is not unique to Cambodia as several other studies have also shown that student’s information literacy levels are generally low (e.g., Al-Qallaf, 2018; Flywel and Jorosi, 2018; Katz, 2013; Rubinić et al., 2013)

According to Rubinić et al. (2013) students believe that taking an information literacy course is beneficial in doing their coursework. Both knowledge and computer literacy areas of undergraduate student’s positive self-efficacy integrate these skills into their courses and guide their students in these areas will have a positive impact on their success. Searching various databases and the Internet are an important part of the information searching process for undergraduate students (Nikolopoulou and Gialamas, 2011) and about 95% of students frequently use the Internet to locate information for research purposes (Head and Eisenberg, 2011). Without the ability to search for information, students are missing out on the positive aspects of seeking information from their own perspective and overcoming the obstacles they could encounter when seeking course-related information (Callinan, 2005).

Our results show that respondents skills and confidence is insufficient. Hence, there is a need to increase undergraduate students’ information literacy self-efficacy especially those relating to research production such as information handling and using library resources. The development of library information resources and user education had been introduced in the USA, UK, Scandinavia, and Australia long before in the universities (Malley, 1978; Miller, 1979; Smith, 2014). Hepworth (2009) stated that information literacy is best enhanced when it is integrated into the formal curriculum of another discipline. The universities should consider updating the curriculum of the secondary school with integration to the university level, and from the first year to fourth-year bachelor programmes. These revising the curriculum should give ample focus on giving opportunities to practice and increase basic knowledge in information literacy and other relevant technical knowledge and skills.

This is a critical challenge for Cambodia since its information technology situation and infrastructure are at a low level (Richardson, 2008). In 2019, there are only 272 available computers in all three universities combined. This quantity is very small compared to 4,519 undergraduate students. Hence, undergraduate students also lack computer rooms and technology-based development infrastructure. Therefore, there should be a proposal for improvement and intervention. This will avoid difficulties in searching for information and improve the overall performance of the students.

Factors related to the information literacy self-efficacy

Another finding of this study is that there were no significant differences in the mean scores in information literacy among males and female respondents. This is contrary to common belief that males are more competent in technology use than women, but several research conducted in the past also showed that there was no significant difference between information skills and the sex of students (Kousar and Mahmood, 2013; Mohamed and Nordin, 2013; Rehman and Mohammad, 2001). This is also consistent with the findings of other similar but not exactly the same works showing that there was no significant difference between sex and self-efficacy in students undertaking degrees in the sciences and technologies (Jordan and Carden, 2017); in Internet use (Korkut and Akkoyunlu, 2014; Nikolopoulou and Gialamas, 2011); and in information literacy (Bond, 2010; Demirel and Akkoyunlu, 2017; Soleymani, 2014). The only research that differed, to our knowledge, is a study conducted among pupils, teachers, head teachers and families in Spain (Ferrer et al. 2011) where the boys and girls in public schools were found to use technology differently. This study, however, covered a demographic different from our target.

In this study, there were no significant differences in the mean scores in information literacy among the fourth year and third year respondents. This is because, according to the printed curricula of the three universities, there was only one course in computer literacy at the foundation year, namely during the first-year. The results of the current study are consistent with the results of other studies where it was found that there was no significant difference of undergraduate students in self-efficacy concerning searching on the Internet and information search practices (Nikolopoulou and Gialamas, 2011) and general outlook on information literacy (Demirel and Akkoyunlu, 2017; Korkut and Akkoyunlu, 2014; Kurbanoglu, 2003) across the academic years.

According to the study, there were a significant mean score difference in all identified factors across faculties. These findings were consistent with other research (Kisla et al. 2009; Mahmood, 2009, 2013) indicating statistically significant difference in information skills of the students belonging to different departments. In our results, undergraduate students of faculty of Business Administration and Tourism and Science and Technology held significantly more positive attitudes compared to undergraduate students of the other faculties. This finding is similar to this reported by (Soleymani, 2014) where students of the management and information sciences faculty had the highest level of information literacy. On the other hand, the undergraduate students from the Art, Humanities and Social Sciences had the lowest average score compared to other facilities, which also parallels the result of a study conducted in Pakistan (Mahmood, 2009). As an implication, faculty members should be made to enhance effectiveness by integrating information literacy programmes into their academic curricula. This can enable students to build the information skills they need and acquire different modalities of information management fit for their areas of studies. This strategy has been done by other universities before; a Ghanaian university stated that ‘The department of information studies at the University of Ghana should review its curriculum to include a new core course in information literacy’ (Dadzie, 2009).

Finally, the results also showed that there was a significant difference among undergraduate students in term of information literacy self-efficacy score depending on when the universities they attended. Undergraduate students of University A performed significantly better than both University B and University C. It is possible that University A performed well because it has the necessary infrastructure such as computer hall, a library using technology infrastructure and supporting funds, and various study materials provided by the local and international Non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In addition, University A has built up a network through a memorandum of agreement with a number of well-known universities abroad, supporting technology infrastructure and study material from non-governmental agencies and government, and global-collaboration projects. For instance, the Institute of Technology of Cambodia established an e-learning centre through the ASEAN Cyber University project at the ASEAN-South Korea summit in 2009. The objective of this project is to facilitate undergraduate students by sharing experiences, knowledge and skills in long-distance education among ASEAN countries and South Korea (ITC, 2019). Behrens (1994) stated that we should ‘Emphasize the importance of partnerships in striving for information literate graduates: partnership between the university administration and the library; partnership between the classroom and the library; and partnership between the business community and the library’.

As an implication, the management of universities B and C should pay attention to human resource development and making the connections between the research cycle and information environment to increase information literacy competency. University policy makers in the government ministries should promote understanding of the search engine experience. Greater funds are needed by the universities to enhance the information literacy, a new framework for enhancing the information literacy competency, and training undergraduate students in a provincial university setting. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport has made several attempts in the past to obtain funding from international sources such as the 2011-2015 master plan for research development in the education supported by World Bank (Cambodia. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, 2011). Individual universities are also not new to such fund-raising activities: in a study conducted by Eam, almost 30% claim that they received funding from international donors either through bilateral (e.g., Japan, France, etc.) or multilateral (e.g., UNESCO, UNICEF, etc.) agreements, almost 4% from the Cambodian government, and almost 5% from local sources such as non-governmental organizations and private institutions (Eam, 2015). A collaborative approach between the different levels of government and educational institutions is necessary in making information technology courses compulsory in the school curriculum (Pelgrum and Law, 2003) to increase the students’ ability to meet the ministries’ goals and to serve Cambodian society.

Conclusions

Undergraduate students at the provincial universities in Cambodia exhibit lower confidence in all three dimensions in the information literacy abilities. We have also shown that past studies indicate that the problem in information literacy self-efficacy can be remedied with well-planned teaching and learning processes. It is hoped that if the universities offer opportunities for students to develop information literacy-based skill in their university coursework, there will be a great improvement of information literacy among undergraduate students. Agreements with funding institutions local and abroad can be catalysts to improving Cambodia’s ICT infrastructure, which can in turn provide students with more opportunities to improve their skills and self-efficacy. It is also suggested that policy making on ICT should be well implemented and conducted by provincial universities to provide practical skills to students from the first to the fourth year.

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Dr. Eam Phyrom at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute for his contributions to this paper by providing comments on the literature review, discussion section, conclusions and future directions. The first author also sincerely appreciates the support and scholarship provided by the JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) AUN/SEED-Net programme.

About the authors

Cheyvuth Seng is from Cambodia and is working through his Ph.D. at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) as a scholar of Japan International Cooperative Agency (JICA). He is a former dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Battambang in Cambodia. He is researching the research efficacy of Cambodian undergraduate students, as well as how do their skills and familiarity with ICT come into play. He can be contacted at: cheyvuth@yahoo.com
May Kristine Jonson Carlon is also a Ph.D. student at Tokyo Tech. Her research interest is in using artificial intelligence in improving online learning experiences.She can be contacted at: maykristine.jonson@gmail.com
Jeffrey S. Cross is a professor at Tokyo Tech in the School of Environment and Society, Department of Transdisciplinary Science and Engineering, where he manages a laboratory doing research on biofuels, Japanese energy policy and artificial intelligence in education. He is notably the founder in 2014 of the Online Education Development Office at Tokyo Tech and is the general manager. He can be contacted at: cross.j.aa@m.titech.ac.jp

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