A Self-Assessment Instrument to Assess Engineering Students' Self-Directedness in Information Literacy

Information literacy, the ability and processes of information gathering and application, is of paramount importance to engineers, engineering design, and engineering decision-making. Building on prior qualitative research, this paper presents the development and initial validation study of a self-directed information literacy assessment for engineering and technology students (n = 366). Internal consistency was found to be high, (alpha = 0.895). Exploratory factor analysis results provide evidence of structural aspects of validity and support for scoring structure. In addition, areas were identified for future development of the items and instrument.