The term “information literacy” (IL) was coined by Paul Zurkowski in the 1970s to bring attention to the needs of people working in emerging technological environments.⁹ Since then, the concept has been mainly used by information specialists, and promulgated worldwide through the work of the American Library Association (ALA) and the National Forum for Information Literacy.¹⁰ However, there is no agreed definition of the term. Some researchers describe IL as requisites to lifelong learning,¹¹ while others perceive it as a natural extension of the concept of literacy in our society.¹² Some have associated IL with information technology,¹³ while others have used it interchangeably with library skills.¹⁴

The 1989 Final Report of the American Library Association’s Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, as a milestone in the history of IL research, not only recognised the importance of IL skills, but also sought to define the term.¹⁵ This definition was widely accepted: to be information literate, a person must be able to recognise the need for information, and to effectively access, evaluate, and creatively use information. Todd defined IL as “a holistic, interactive learning process encompassing the skills of defining, locating, selecting, organising, presenting, and evaluating information.”¹⁶ Goad gave a brief definition as “the ability to search for, find, evaluate, and use information from a variety of sources.”¹⁷

In the twenty-first century, IL requires a move beyond a skills-based approach, especially in response to technological innovations such as the Internet and should focus on the production of knowledge in collaboration with others.¹⁸ Marcum proposed IL should focus on social and multimodal networked technological environments in line with the proliferation of web technologies.¹⁹ As a result, current innovative collaborative technologies such as social media environments and online communities have resulted in calls for IL to be redefined as a subfield of metaliteracy or metacompetency.²⁰ Metaliteracy is defined as an overarching and self-referential framework that integrates emerging technologies and unifies multiple literacy types, which encompasses IL and other interrelated concepts including media literacy, digital literacy, visual literacy, cyberliteracy, and information fluency.²¹ It is without a doubt that IL is central to this redefinition because information takes many forms online and is produced and communicated through multiple modalities.

Critical IL is an emerging discipline for IL instruction. Based on a review of Accardi, Drabinski, and Kumbier’s book Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, Kershner pointed out that current trends in IL instruction display two main themes: the first is the “one-shot” session that still remains the preferred format, and the second is the growing interest in assessment for measuring the outcomes.²² Using the critical literacy theory to define IL, Elmborg argued that literacy educators must focus less on information transfer and more on developing critical consciousness in students.²³ In another words, IL instructors must stop teaching “library-as-subject,” and instead specialize in coaching critical development and intellectual growth.

The landmark publication “Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning” produced by American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) subsequently became the basis for IL standards and guidelines in numerous educational institutions across several countries.²⁴ The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) expanded on the standards and guidelines given in the AASL publication and produced its “Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education.”²⁵

Moving away from the United States, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) adopted the ACRL standards, modified them, and developed their own “Information Literacy Standards” for use primarily in higher education although they are applicable to other educational levels.²⁶ The standards were revised in 2003 and renamed as the “Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework.” Similarly, the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) in the United Kingdom presented their position paper on “Information skills in higher education.”²⁷ The paper proposed the “Seven Pillars Model” based on seven skill sets that stemmed from a basic competence in library and information technology skills.

In Singapore, more than a decade ago, the School Libraries Unit of the MOE’s Curriculum Planning and Development Division (CPDD) prepared and published the Information Literacy Guidelines (ILG) and Information Literacy Supplementary Materials (ILSM) for use in Singapore schools from the elementary through preuniversity level.²⁸ Using the aforementioned standards as a guide, a group of researchers from Nanyang Technological University proposed a 6+3 model to help develop IL standards for schools in Singapore.²⁹

With the emergence of standards, comes the need for assessment, a way to measure performance against the standards. The objectives for assessing IL usually include: to increase student learning, to provide accountability, and/ or to strengthen instructional programs.³⁰

Oakleaf identified three major assessment approaches, fixed-choice test, performance assessment, and rubrics.³¹ Comparatively, fixed-choice test is easier to implement and widely adopted for assessing IL skills, as it is less resources-intensive, and the results can be used for comparison at different levels from individual to institutional. Examples include standardized IL tests such as Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (SAILS), Tool for Real-Time Assessment of Information Literacy (TRAILS) and Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA) assessing discrete IL skills.³² These standardized tests allow efficient testing of large number of students and they can be easily adapted for use at other institutions.

Performance assessment, which includes methods such as bibliographic assessment, observation of student behaviour and simulation, tests higher level skills but it is more resource intensive.³³ This approach increases the relevance of IL instruction and uses authentic assessment. The third approach, rubrics, involves using a set of descriptive scoring schemes to evaluate students’ work, which allows measurement of higher-order thinking and enables students to understand the expectation of their instructors.³⁴ Rubrics are suitable for IL instruction that is integrated into other subject curriculum, as its flexibility allows easy transfer to any discipline or learning environment.³⁵

However, in the recent years, results derived from the various IL assessments across the world were unsatisfactory. Students appear to have strong reliance on Internet search engines for acquiring information.³⁶ Internet search engines may help retrieve overwhelming number of results efficiently, however, unlike academic resources as electronic databases and journals, the retrieved information may not be always reliable and accurate. Relying heavily or merely on web sources may result in the potential spread of misinformation and disinformation. Moreover, only a small portion of students would be able to formulate proper search strategy using Boolean operators, assess the credibility of a source, and differentiate citations and reference sources.³⁷ According to a study conducted in the UK and the US, only half of the faculty members felt that the graduated students had all the seven IL skills highlighted in the SCONUL assessment.³⁸ Against this background, this study attempts to assess the IL skills of Singapore tertiary students.

The College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) comprises three schools in Nanyang Technological University, namely, School of Arts, Design, and Media (ADM), School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI). The number and percentage of respondents from each school is shown in table 1.

Among the 534 responding students, the majority (525 or 98.31 percent) were born between 1986 and 1992, and 126 (23.6 percent) were male while 408 (76.4 percent) were female. Some 489 (91.6 percent) of the respondents received their pretertiary education in Singapore. The majority of students (531 or 99.4 percent) own a personal computer, and nearly all of them (except 1 student) have Internet access at their place of residence. Only 90 (16.9 percent) of the students had taken the course related to IL. The respondents’ year of study was shown in figure 1.

Students were asked their frequency of visiting and using resources in various libraries respectively. The results are shown in tables 2 and 3. It was not surprising to find that students tended to visit and use resources in university library more frequently as compared to the other libraries. For each kind of library, the frequency of using resources was slightly less than visiting. It is possible that some students study in the library without consulting its information resources.

All six aspects of IL skills covered by the Big6 model were tested through multiple-choice questions. As mentioned earlier, the questions were weighted differently according to their difficulty levels, and some questions had more than one correct answer. The scores are normalized to 100 percent for each category and as a whole instrument. Figure 2 shows the spread of the standardized percentage scores among the study population. The majority of students scored between 50 and 80 out of 100. The standardized percentage scores for each aspect of IL are shown in table 4. The scores are moderate at an overall study population level, with a mean score at 64.81/100. “Task Definition” is the best-performing area, whereas “information evaluation” is the poorest-performing area, with the mean score at 50.31/100.

Table 5 lists the standardized mean score for each area of IL skills. The respondents scored above 90/100 for questions about narrowing search results, Boolean operators and stop-words. However, students seemed to lack understanding how to use the index of a book; how to differentiate fact, view, and opinion; and how to select authoritative information sources and information evaluation tools. All these areas registered mean scores between 50 and 100. Respecting intellectual property is an important aspect of information ethics. A question was asked to test students’ understanding of copyright, which appeared to be a serious issue with the mean score of 15.17/100.

Male students were found to score slightly higher than female students (65.02 vs. 64.74). Students receiving pretertiary education in Singapore scored higher than those coming from overseas (65.44 vs. 57.76), and the difference was found to be significant (significance = 0.000) through t-test. Further analysis detected significant differences for “information seeking,” “location & access,” “information use,” and “information synthesis” at the 0.05 level (table 6).

As expected, students who had taken the IL related course before scored higher than the rest of students (70.78 vs. 63.58), and the difference was also found to be significant (significance = 0.000). Further analysis showed “information seeking,” “location & access,” “information synthesis,” and “information evaluation” contribute significantly to the difference at the 0.01 level (table 7).

It was not surprising to find that there was an improvement of scores with the year of study, with higher level students performing better than the lower level students in the university (figure 3). Further comparison showed that higher scores were attributed to areas of “information seeking,” “location & access” and “information synthesis” (figure 4). This is easily understandable as senior students, studying higher level subjects with higher levels of difficult and demand, are more experienced information seekers, for they tend to be more engaged in information-intensive activities, such as assignments, final year project, and job hunting.

Figure 5 shows the standardized mean percentage score across the three participating schools. It was found that students from WKWSCI scored higher than the other two schools. This result was expected as IL had been integrated as a compulsory course into their curriculum for these students. It is also possible that these are brighter students as the academic requirement for students admitted to WKWSCI are the highest among the schools in the college.

Figure 6 presents the comparisons of mean scores for each IL skill across the three schools. It was found that the scores for “information synthesis” showed the greatest difference, with WKWSCI having the highest score percentage of 67.54 and ADM having the lowest score percentage of 47.06. This is probably due to the higher requirement in synthesizing information for students majoring in communication studies, especially for those specializing in journalism and communication research.