INFLUENCE OF UNDERGRADUATES’ LEARNING SKILLS ON ELECTRONIC RESOURCES USAGE IN PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES IN SOUTH-WEST NIGERIA

Abstract

Students are able to exhibit numerous learning skills in the course of schooling, especially on e- resources usage, yet fail to judiciously access and utilize the resources for their fullest academic advantage because of their lack of necessary learning skills, strategies, and tactics to locate needed information, as well as the skills to verify the authenticity of the accessed information. These, therefore, call for the need to assess the influence of undergraduates’ learning skills on electronic resources usage in private universities in South-west Nigeria. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study with population of 4684 undergraduates across faculties of Social Sciences/Management and Sciences in fifteen (15) private universities in South-west Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling procedure was adopted for this study with the use of purposive sampling to select common faculties in all the universities at the first stage. The second stage was to purposively select three (3) from the common departments in the selected faculties with the highest population of students. The total number of undergraduates in the selected departments from 200-400 levels is 1,899. Due to the large number of undergraduates in the selected departments, a sampling fraction of 70% was drawn using proportionate to size at the third stage. This gave a sample size of 1,327. Adapted questionnaire with three sub-scales was employed to gather data on the learning skills and purpose(s) of e-resources use by the respondents. Data collection was carried out between April and October, 2020. Frequency counts, percentages, mean, standard deviation and the Pearson Product Moment Correlation were the methods used to analyze the study’s data. The findings revealed that the undergraduates made use of e-resources for facilitating class and home assignments, gathering materials for formulating term papers, building up projects’ reports, knowledge update and personal self-development of the respondents. The findings further indicated that a significant relationship exists have between learning skills and e-resources usage by the undergraduates. Thus, learning skills have influence on electronic resources use by undergraduates in private universities in South-west Nigeria. Therefore, the managements of the universities are implored to provide and coordinate the critical, creative, communicating and collaborative skills needed by the undergraduates, and endeavour to subscribe to relevant and current e-databases in order to meet the varying information needs of the students as means of addressing the learning skills on e-resources of the undergraduates.