Measuring Information Literacy Skills in Education: Development and Validation of a Standards-based Assessment Scale

This text describes the development and validation of an information literacy assessment scale specific to education. Information literacy has been recognized by a number of professional organizations and accrediting bodies as an essential skill for success in the 21st century, and consequently has become a key learning outcome of a number of education programs. Teacher candidates are expected to teach and model information literacy skills to their students, yet rarely is it suggested that they are adequately prepared to do so. The scale described herein was developed to measure information literacy skills in the field of education in an effort to inform curricular and instructional decisions and to provide evidence of institutional effectiveness for program reviews. Test content is based on standards from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). The work has been recognized for its technical merit in describing validation procedures and for revisiting the discussion of traditional versus modern approaches to validating cognitive instruments.