Towards Modeling and Measuring Information Literacy in Secondary Education

Abstract

The networked information and media society provides us increasingly with digital information and knowledge. However, the effective and efficient use of information requires a high level of information literacy (IL), i.e. adequate capabilities to deal with information. Despite of its growing importance, IL has been considered only sporadically in information systems research and education. There is a lack of a scientifically proven model to operationalize and measure IL. The paper contributes to fill this gap by providing a synthesis on existing research related to definition, conceptualization and measurement of IL. Applying the proposed framework through a survey with 86 high school students, we find relatively poor skill levels for the objective IL for most of the students, while the self-assessed IL is distinctly higher. In addition, our study shows that individual differences in IL can be explained by the student’s grade, web experience and the comprehension of the curriculum