Information literacy in social studies: A case study for student reviews

Information literacy is one of the requirements of the Information Society. Information literacy includes skills such as knowing when and where to find the information it needs, complying with ethical principles in evaluating information, organizing information and re-creating information. Training citizens of the Republic of Turkey by equipping students with skills and values to generate and use information is one of the main objectives of the social studies program. In this respect, the importance of the relationship between social studies and information literacy is immediately apparent. This study is important in terms of being a first in the field of social studies. In reviewing the literature in Turkey, there was no evidence of a study considering the information literacy of secondary school students in the social sciences field. 2005 and 2017 Social study programs are considered as skills, value, acquisition, learning areas (Science Technology Community unit from learning areas) in terms of information literacy. The study was carried out on 141 students studying in Bolu secondary schools in 2015-2016 academic year. All of these students are 8th grade students. Qualitative research method was used in the research. And descriptive case study was used as one of the qualitative research models. In the first part of our research, a pre-interview form suitable for semi-structured interview technique, which is one of the qualitative research methods, in the second part, document analysis technique which is another data collection technique in qualitative research, were used. Findings obtained from the interview forms descriptive analysis by content analysis method and presented in tables with graphics, frequency and percentage distributions. The results obtained from the findings of this study which was conducted in order to determine the status of information literacy in social studies through homework analysis of students are; When the students were asked which websites do you intend to use for their homework during the pre-interview, 51.1% did not specify any website name to search for the information. It was concluded that more than half of the students did not know where to search and there was a problem with their access skills. Therefore, it was found that they could not use information search strategies. When the homework from the students was examined, it was seen that 63.3% of the students used the information they received from the websites by using copy-paste method and 97.5% did not include the bibliography in their homework. It was thought that, this was caused from the students' lack of information literacy skills such as processing information, parsing, filtering, citing while using the information in their research considering the ethical principles. In the light of these findings, the suggestions for future studies on information literacy education and the suggestions of future research is that; in the results of the research, it was seen that the students did their homework as cut, copy and paste. In order to prevent these problems, studies can be made to make the assignments more original by informing teachers about the use of plagiarism programs such as Turnitin. The Ministry of National Education can organize education programs in this direction since information literacy should be provided to students at very young ages. In addition, the Ministry of National Education and related institutions can establish a digital research platform or create a virtual library where all reliable sources can be gathered under one roof to ensure that students have access to the right sources of information.