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Assessing Engineering Students' Information Literacy Skills: An Alpha Version Of A Multiple-Choice Instrument, Ruth Eh Wertz, Meagan Ross, Senay Purzer, Michael Fosmire, Monica Cardella

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Information literacy is crucial component of developing life-long learning skills. However, few standard and easily gradable assessment tools exist to assess the information literacy competencies of learners. In this paper, we discuss the development of a multiple choice instrument designed to measure these competencies in an efficient and expedient manner, and we present results of data collected from 366 first-year engineering students. The instrument requires students to first read a technical memo and, based on the memo‟s arguments, answer eight multiple choice and two open-ended response questions. The mean score on the multiple choice portion was only 3.46 out of …