Many postgraduate students cannot cope with the demands of higher education. In South Africa one in every six students never graduates. Poor preparation for higher education includes students' meager computer and information literacy skills. While computer literacy refers to understanding the use of computers, McMillan (1996) promotes the term comperacy that focuses on the ability to conﬁdently use a variety of electronic tools in speciﬁc contexts. The researchers developed a comperacy instrument consisting of a self-rating and an objective practical component to assess incoming postgraduate students' comperacy. Statistical analyses revealed good internal consistency for all scales. Only 36% of the students tested satisfactory for basic comperacy. The analysis indicated bimodal data—students either have comperacy or not. The self-ratings were not accurate indicators of comperacy as students rated their comperacy lower or higher than their practical comperacy reﬂected. Practically signiﬁcant correlations indicated that students' electronic ﬁle management abilities were a good predictor of general comperacy. The researchers propose a framework for comperacy development of postgraduate students.
|Document Title:||Comperacy assessment of postgraduate students' readiness for higher education|
|Journal:||Internet and Higher Education|
|No. of Pages:||101-107|
|Document Type:||Journal Article (Peer Reviewed)|
|Keywords:||Computer Literacy, Competency, Postgraduate Students, ICT (Information & Communication Technology), Information Literacy, Information Needs|
|Date Added:||05 September 2012|