Abstract:

Currently we are said to live in an information society (Webster, 2006). In this scenario, the concept of information literacy becomes a key aspect. It entails the learning of the skills, competences, knowledge and value to access, use and communicate information in any of its forms, in order to produce competent professionals trained in the routines of identifying, evaluating and recording information sources appropriately and with the knowledge to process and produce their own information (Pinto, Doucet, & Fernández-Ramos, 2007).

Diverse measurement and self-assesment tools have been developed in order to analyse the information literacy skills. Among them, in this study the IL-HUMASS survey will be used. It is a comprehensive and user-friendly survey containing and exhaustive set of variables related to information literacy for the specific target population of the higher education in the humanities and social sciences (Pinto, 2010).

According to this survey, information literacy skills are divided in four main factors: information search, information evaluation, information processing, and information communication and dissemination. In turn, each of the factors is integrated by several ítems (Pinto, 2010).

Based on this classification proposed by Pinto (2010), the aim of this study is to analyse whether there are any relationships between the development of skills of each of the four factors. For instance, does the development of information search skills foster the development of information evaluation skills?

In order to fulfil this objective, the IL-HUMASS survey (Pinto, 2010) was conducted among First Year university students from the Business and Management degree who attended a course about information management. Each student had to answer the survey using it as a self-assesment tool and valuing each skill with a Likert scale (1 to 9) according to their own perception.

The method used in this study was structural equation modeling (SEM), using the partial least squares (PLS) approach.

According to the results obtained based on the perceptions of the students, the development information search skills influence the development of information evaluation skills, and information processing skills. In turn, the development of information processing skills influences the development of information communication skills.

Keywords:

Information, information literacy, skills, development, IL-HUMASS, survey, university, self-assesment, SEM, PLS.