Understanding the information literacy competencies of UK Higher Education students

Abstract: There has been some interesting debate regarding the assessment of students’ information literacy skills. Key questions have arisen such as: what standards and criteria should we use to assess students, what are we actually trying to measure, what type of test is the most appropriate, what do the results mean, how do we measure improvements and what are the effects of intervention. Our research project, funded by the LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, decided to address the above questions via the use of psychometric tests. An online information literacy audit, the ILT (Wise et al., 2005), was used to assess the information literacy skills of a cohort of undergradute students in the Department of Information & Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University from 2008 to 2010. Based on the ACRL standards the ILT measures four of the five information literacy competencies. Our specific research aims were to ascertain if the testing methods were appropriate to UK students, identify areas for information literacy improvement raised in the test scores, identify practitioner intervention strategies and find out whether they could make a difference to students’ information literacy levels. Test results (presented and discussed in detail in the chapter) indicated that students struggled with (predictable) areas of Information Literacy, and that (a) identification and intervention in this area is useful to students and information literacy helpers (whoever they are); (b) intervention needs to be ongoing – not only in Year 1; (c) even up to their final year students continue to struggle with the same particular activities; and (d) a variety of approaches to support may be needed to help students develop their skills. Following completion of the testing, discussions have taken place with the CILIP CSG for information literacy regarding the creation of a UK information literacy question bank.