The integration of information-handling skills into the South African secondary school curriculum
Loading...
Files
Date
2023
Authors
Nuku, Bomkazi
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
The existing research claims that information-handling skills do not receive the necessary attention in some South African secondary schools, even though they are recommended by the National Guidelines for School Library and Information Services. The existing research affirms that this impacts negatively on learners, as a result they perform poorly in certain subjects, and this phenomenon ends up impacting on their tertiary education. The non-existence of the training manual for schools and the lack of the recent research on the integration of information-handling skills into curriculum opened the gap for this study to take place. The study intended to identify insights regarding a step-by-step integration of information-handling skills into the South African secondary school curriculum. Due to non-existence of the National School Library Policy that may provide recommendations on the integration of information-handling skills into curriculum, this study was limited to refer to few educational documents and policies, which had no in-depth information on information-handling skills but on curriculum. This study adopted an interpretivism paradigm to focus on the participants' own experiences in six secondary schools in Bloemfontein with school libraries, from various quintiles to represent the whole population relevant to the study. For this reason, either librarians or library committee members from both quintile (1-3 and 4-5) were interviewed per school during semi-structured interviews to reveal the status of the media centers. Teachers from both quintile (1-3 and 4-5) schools were requested to produce their lesson plans and learners’ research work for analysis during document analysis. Also, learners were observed while accessing the media center resources in quintile (4-5) level schools during structured observation. The study revealed that the concerns raised in the problem statement still exist to this day, and the consequences are that plagiarism is committed, and that learners may not be ready for a tertiary education, according to previous research studies. This study addresses these concerns and contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing the Information-Handling Skills (IHS) enhancement model in secondary schools. The study recommends urgent implementation of this model, this would enable the successful integration of information-handling skills into curriculum by schools at all levels.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.(Curriculum Studies))--University of the Free State, 2023
Keywords
Information-handling skills, curriculum, school media center, multi-media resources, plagiarism