Volume 17, 2014 ISSN: 2165-1019

Approved December 17, 2013 www.ala.org/aasl/slr

Factors Affecting Students’ Information Literacy as They Transition from High School to College
Jana Varlejs, Professor Emerita, Rutgers, 612 S. First Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, 732846-6850 Eileen Stec, Instruction & Outreach Librarian, Douglass Library, Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, 848-932-5009 Hannah Kwon, PhD Student, Rutgers SC&I, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Abstract
Despite the considerable attention paid to the need to increase the information literacy of high school students in preparation for the transition to college, poor research skills still seem to be the norm. To gain insight into the problem, library instruction environments of nineteen high schools were explored. The schools were selected based on whether their graduates did well or poorly on information-skills assignments integrated in a required first-year college course. The librarians in the nineteen schools were asked to characterize their working relationships with teachers, estimate their students’ information-literacy achievement, and provide data on their staffing and budgets. Findings suggest that school librarians are seldom in a position to adequately collaborate with teachers and that their opportunities to help students achieve information literacy are limited.

Introduction
The study reported in this paper was inspired by observations made by students in the Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS) program at Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey in the United States. For many years, MLIS students in both the Information Literacy: Learning and Teaching and the Field Experience courses commented that undergraduates whom they encountered as part of their assignments were poor users of academic library resources. This was true at Princeton as well as Rutgers and New Jersey