Evaluating an Information Literacy Assessment Instrument: Evaluating an Information Literacy Assessment Instrument

Google is both a bane and a boon. One of its greatest merits is that it empowers
users, even with little IT and/or information retrieval skills, to find information
easily on the Web. However, at the same time there is the danger that
many users start believing that they are highly information literate. In order
to avoid such wrong self-evaluations, multiple choice questionnaires could
be a promising approach since they allow a quick (self-) assessment of the
respective level of information literacy.
This article reports on a survey in which such an information literacy questionnaire
was used to assess information literacy of students in a bachelor
course providing an introduction to this topic. For this purpose, the test instrument
which was developed at the University of Düsseldorf (Beutelspacher
2014a) was slightly adopted to the professional background of the
students (business administration). In this article, we will report about the
acceptance of this test instrument by the business administration students,
about the experienced advantages, the perceived problem areas, and those
information literacy aspects which cannot be covered by such an instrument
in their opinion.