Abstract:

The immense possibilities offered by Technologies Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in terms of access and communication of information have led the challenge of the necessity of having the skills to evaluate and organize such information because of the sheer volume and variety of it.
Moreover, in the current situation of the implementation of the European Higher Education Space in Spain, information literacy, defined as the optimum capacity of identifying information needs, location, analysis, management and communication of such information has become a key element in the basic competencies of university students, since those skills have not been developed formally in the curriculum of educational levels above.
Given this situation, it was considered necessary since the research group Education and Citizenship at the University of the Balearic Islands, to carry out a project to analyze the level of information skills of university students and to verify, thus the deficits and potentiallity of students in the location and use of information. To do this, we used the guidelines set by the Association of College and Research Libraries and American Library Association (ACRL-ALA, 2000) that define the student competent in access and use of information as the one being able to :
1. Determining the scope of information required
2. Access information effectively and efficiently
3. Critically evaluate information and its sources
4. Incorporate selected information into his own knowledge base
5. Use information effectively to accomplish specific tasks.
From these five parameters we designed a questionnaire, which included different assessment items for each of these dimensions, and was administrated to a total of 1.025 pre-graduate students at the University of the Balearic Islands.
Analysis of these five dimensions are structured according to the variables gender, age, grade and subject area. This responded to the possibility of establishing relationships between these variables and the results for each of the dimensions and to identify, thus, more pronounced weakness or possession of more refined skills in access to and use of information by students according to different established groups.
Due to the need for synthesis of this communication, it has been chosen by the exposure of the partial results obtained in one dimension in particular, skills in critical evaluation of information and its sources by the university students.
Analysis of the results has allowed not only to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the strategies of data analysis used by students, but the design of improvement programs, focusing on the needs identified and in line with initiatives already implemented in other university contexts, both nationally and internationally, allowing the acquisition and optimal development of the necessary information skills among students in higher education.

Keywords:

Information literacy, basic competencies, evaluation of information, higher education.