Introduction

The term “information literacy†denotes a set of abilities necessary to recognize an information need and to locate, evaluate, and use information adequately. In formal as well as informal educational contexts, information literacy is assumed to be an essential prerequisite of self-regulated learning and to promote academic achievements. However, only a few standardized objective tests assessing these competencies have been published. Many studies evaluating information literacy rely on self-report questionnaires which have not been validated.

Objectives

Evidence for the reliability and validity of the Information Literacy Test for Psychology (ILT-P), a multiple-choice test that assesses declarative information literacy knowledge in the domain of psychology is presented.

Design/Methodology

The ILT-P consists of 35 multiple-choice items (most of them with three options, 0 to 3 options being correct) referring to searching and evaluating scholarly publications. The test was administered in four studies (Study 1: N = 82 psychology students, Study 2: N = 139 psychology students, Study 3: N = 141 educational students; Study 4: N = 101 educational students) together with other measures of information literacy.

Results

The ILT-P demonstrated acceptable reliability (Cronbach’s Alpha, Guttman’s Lambda 6) in all studies. Regarding validity, moderate to high correlations were found with a) a test of academic information-seeking skills in psychology, and b) two types of standardized scholarly information search tasks. In addition, ILT-P scores are associated with study year (as a proxy of academic information searching expertise), and psychology students outperform educational students on the test. Finally, there is a positive correlation between ILT-P scores and psychology students’ grade point average.

Conclusions

It is concluded that the ILT-P is a reliable and valid test of scholarly information literacy in the domain of psychology. Thus, the test constitutes a useful assessment tool for research on information literacy in higher education.