Information Literacy in Turkish National Education System: A Research on Policies, Curricula, Teachers and Students

The fact that Millions of students in the education system do not have information literacy skills in both their academic and daily lives in current conditions is still a big problem. The main purpose of this research is to reveal what are being implemented in order to enable the students to gain information literacy skills with teaching programs and within the frame of the factors affecting Turkish National Educational System and suggest solutions. Within this context, policy documents guiding the Turkish National Education System were examined within the frame of information literacy elements and 13 curricula of 9th grade were evaluated. In order to understand the cases affecting the application, questionnaires were applied to 389 students attending 9th grade in 11 science high schools in Ankara and 197 teachers lecturing in these courses. In the study, quantitative and qualitative research methods were used together accordance with the descriptive method. In data collection phase, content analysis was made and survey was applied. The obtained data were analyzed by IBM Statistics SPSS 22.0 software package. As a result, it has been determined that documents affecting the Turkish National Education System do not include arrangements to provide learners with information literacy skills as a whole. Curriculum was found out not to include information literacy elements as a whole. These results were indicated in teacher and student surveys. A model proposal and other suggestions were developed to resolve the problems and make future plans.