Information literacy is central to South African education, which explicitly aims to provide school leavers with the skills demanded by the global information society. This research attempts to closely correlate between information literacy and information literacy education to view educational change in South Africa. It focuses on compulsory school education rather than tertiary because there is consensus in university circles that the issues of information literacy
education at the tertiary level have their roots in shortcomings in our schools (Walker 2001; De Jager & Nassimbeni 2002).
It is a truism that if our school leavers are information literate then our university educators and employers can only benefit.
The construct of information literacy includes two layers of competence. The first refers to students’ technical abilities to access information from a variety of sources and using a variety of tools, with a specific emphasis on the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) of the information age. The second layer refers to the subjective sense-making processes of information literacy.
Schoolteachers make many educational decisions about what constitute necessary competencies and about how reading and writing should be taught in the classroom. In many parts of Africa and the developing world, teachers make these decisions intuitively, although a systematic process of monitoring is more effective in promoting students’ literacy development. When teachers
monitor the school’s literacy program, they track the reading progress of their students, the results of different teaching methods, and the value of various materials used.
Such an institutional approach allows teachers to judge the value
of their program and to evaluate its effectiveness, while making the appropriate improvements.
