How to Measure Information Literacy? An Evaluation Based on Expert Interviews

While the importance of Information Literacy (IL) in today’s digital age is acknowledged, the question of its measurement remains rather unresolved and challenging. This paper reviews the literature and outlines a representative overview of approaches to IL assessment. Building on that, the work provides a detailed evaluation of existing approaches by gathering the perspectives of 15 experts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with German, US-American and Canadian experts from information and library science. The results largely confirm the state of research, including the challenge of finding a consensus on how to approach the measurement. By deducing an estimation of the available standard instruments, achievement and performance assessment approaches are compared in particular. Additionally, the development of IL assessment in the future is a major focus. In this regard, aspects, such as cognitive heuristics in the context of measuring IL are addressed.