Evaluating an Information Literacy Assessment Instrument - The Case of a Bachelor Course in Business Administration

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. In: F. Pehar/C. Schlögl/C. Wolff (Eds.). Re:inventing Information Science in the Networked Society. Proceedings of the 14 International Symposium on Information Science (ISI 2015), Zadar, Croatia, 19—21 May 2015. Glückstadt: Verlag Werner Hülsbusch, pp. 482—491. Evaluating an Information Literacy Assessment Instrument 483