Research Background and Methodology
The study investigated how students’ personal characteristics and information and communication technology (ICT) skills relate to their level of information literacy (IL), with the aim of identifying the ICT/psychological concepts that are most closely related to IL and could help in planning future IL education in terms of focus, methods and timing. The study determined the IL level of 498 undergraduate students using a 40-item knowledge test (Boh et al., 2016), examined the influence of demographic parameters (gender, study major, year of study), compared the IL with two aspects of ICT literacy measured by the 26-item questionnaire (Šorgo et al., 2016), and examined IL’s relation to seven psychological characteristics, using a 70-item questionnaire (Juriševič et al., 2016).
Results
Students demonstrated moderate IL knowledge (M=67.3%, SD =12.3%). Gender and study major type (science vs. social science) were not significant factors, unlike year of study. Factor analysis revealed three areas of ICT tool use: a) general (e.g., search engines, social media, videos), b) learning (office tools, virtual classrooms, bibliographic databases), c) working (image/video editing, programming). IL correlated best with general use (r=0.16). Factor analysis revealed three areas of Internet confidence: a) general (e.g., search engines, social media), b) advanced (forums, presenting work), and c) specialized (scientific databases). General factor correlated best with IL (r=0.23). Of the seven psychological characteristics (PSY), self-concepts about learning (r=0.25) and problem solving (r=0.23) correlated best with IL. Factor analysis on PSY revealed three factors: a) learning/motivation, b) problem solving/self-efficacy, c) external motivation. Factors a) and b) correlated best with IL (r=0.23 and 0.17, respectively).
Conclusions
Our results offer some suggestions for IL practice. Although studies often show that digital natives are not necessarily information literate, we found that students’ IL was associated with both frequency and confidence of search engine use and confidence using social media. Therefore, ICT skills conducive to IL should be emphasized in IL education. Students’ problem-solving ability correlated positively with both IL and ICT literacy, implying that IL education would benefit from incorporating a problem-based approach wherever possible. External motivation did not have a significant effect on IL in our study, so students’ autonomous motivation should be addressed more during IL instruction. The characteristics of the curriculum combined with small differences in IL between 1st and 2nd year students suggest that the 2nd year of study may be optimal for introducing an IL course.
Acknowledgements
The study was financially supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, project J5-5535.
References
- Boh Podgornik, B., Dolničar, D., Šorgo, A., & Bartol, T. (2016). Development, testing, and validation of an information literacy test (ILT) for higher education. J. assoc. info. sci. technol., 67(10), 2420–36.
- Juriševič, M., Baggia, A., Bartol, T., Dolničar, D., Glažar, S. A., Kljajić Borštnar, M., Pucihar, A., Rodič, B., Sajovic, I., Šorgo, A., Boh Podgornik, B. (2016). Motivational aspects of information literacy in higher education. In The International Conference on Excellence & Innovation in Basic-Higher Education & Psychology, Rijeka, Croatia, May 18-21, 2016 (p. 93).
- Šorgo, A., Bartol, T., Dolničar, D., & Boh Podgornik, B. (2017). Attributes of digital natives as predictors of information literacy in higher education. Brit. J. Educ. Technol., 48(3), 749–67.
Danica Dolničar, Bojana Boh Podgornik
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
English 
French