Socio-Cognitive Relevance of Information Literacy: The impact on student academic work

Relevance seems to be a topic that continues to escape common understanding and agreement among information science researchers. At the same time relevance is acknowledged by the same as a fundamental cornerstone in information science. A contemporary area of relevance research is the concept of relevance from a user socio-cognitive view. This study aims to investigate undergraduate student perceptions of the socio-cognitive relevance of information literacy competencies to their academic work; to identify the factors that make information literacy competencies socio-cognitively relevant to their academic work. Socio-cognitive relevance is the perception of something being useful and meaningful. Learning how students perceive and rank the usefulness and meaningfulness of information literacy competencies for their academic work will be valuable for improving pedagogical work, supporting academia goals such as retention and completion, and improving how to communicate the value of information literacy competencies as transferable competencies for successful career and workplace experiences, and improve lifelong learning information awareness. There are recent studies that have provided data on undergraduate student perceptions of interacting with information in the academic environment but not specifically the complex triad of information literacy competencies, socio-cognitive relevance and undergraduate student academic work. A cross-sectional mixed-methods two-stage sequential study is planned. Stage one includes using an online survey to gather quantitative data and stage two includes a focus group to gather qualitative data. The first stage of the study intends to gather data of students’ views or perceptions of information literacy competencies as relevant to their academic work. The survey will provide questions in a Likert-type, rank order scale. The stage two focus group questions will be designed to discover what the students identify as factors that make information literacy competencies socio-cognitively relevant to them in order to successfully complete their academic work. Using the theory of relevance as a framework and a pragmatic epistemological and methodological approach, the study aims to contribute to the growing literature in information literacy and nascent space in information science on socio-cognitive relevance.