| The information age has ushered in, which is dominated by science, knowledge and information. Nowadays, as a part of the human being's integrated qualities, information literacy has been attached more and more importance to by the education circle. In this context, educating and preparing nursing undergraduate students with high-level information literacy must become an important objective of our higher nursing education. What information literacy should nursing undergraduate students be required of and how to prepare and evaluate their information literacy will be the research subject by nursing faculties.Firstly, with the theory-based study, we defined the "information literacy of nursing undergraduate students" as the quality of searching and utilizing of information about nursing science and related subjects by education and practice in nursing colleges. Three major elements were involved: information consciousness, information competency and information moral, each of which consisted of sub-elements. After the determination by a panel of experts on education, nursing and teaching administration, preliminary framework on information literacy of nursing undergraduate students was proposed, which is the guideline of future information literacy education for nursing undergraduate students. Secondly, with self-made information literacy questionnaire and information consciousness scale for the nursing undergraduate students, we carried out investigation to determine the current status of information literacy of nursing undergraduate students in Shanghai. The results suggested that the level of information literacy of nursing undergraduate students in Shanghai is not high, which was manifested as follows: ①the result of scales showed that their overall information consciousness is not strong, with quite low average score of information behavior tendency, but quite high of informationcognition comparatively；②nursing undergraduates don't search information in the library and on internet frequently,which are mainly influenced by "heavy load of study"and"limited knowledge and competencies of information searching and internet using"；③nursing undergraduate students have little interest on information of nursing science and related subjects. Apart from textbooks, few students read extracurricular books and journals on specialized subjects, especially on nursing science. And also they rarely read references in foreign languages； ④nursing undergraduate students have few opportunities to practise information searching and using, being unfamiliar with information sources, including nursing journals, nursing websites and databases, without frequent use of modern techniques of information searching. Besides, only a small portion of nursing undergraduate students had the experiences of writing one or several papers and reviews；⑤nursing information environment is not very satisfactory and faculties have little sense of responsibilities to train nursing undergraduate students information literacy. Thirdly, some countermeasures were put forward aiming at the problems found in investigation:①update education philosophy and integrate information literacy training into overall quality education for nursing undergraduate students；②help nursing undergraduate students to establish correct ideas of information value, inspire their information needs and behavior to help them form intense and sensitive information consciousness；③intensify the teaching and practice to improve information competency of nursing undergraduate students；④integrate information literacy training into program teaching and establish new teaching model；⑤improve the environment of information literacy training, under which nursing undergraduate students can fully develop information literacy. Lastly, we suggested that the "analysis of references" be used as the tool of final evaluation of information literacy of nursing undergraduate students by using it to assess their graduation reviews or papers.
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