Fostering Information Literacy in German Psychology Students Using a Blended Learning Approach

This paper reports about the experimental evaluation of a blended learning course for information literacy tailored to the needs of undergraduate Psychology students. The course consists of three modules delivered online and two classroom seminars; the syllabus includes scholarly information resources, ways to obtain literature, and criteria to evaluate publications. For evaluation purposes, a multimethod approach was used: The students completed an information literacy knowledge test and three standardized information search tasks (ordered by ascending difficulty) before and after taking the course. A sample of N = 67 undergraduate Psychology students (n = 37 experimental group, n = 30 waiting control group) participated in the course. As it was expected, students’ knowledge test scores as well as performance in the search tasks improved markedly during the course. Results are discussed with regard to the soundness of the evaluation criteria used and to further development of the course.