A Digital Tool for Self-Assessing Information Literacy Skills

To encourage students to recognize the value of information literacy skills and to improve these skills, we have developed an online tool called infoCompetences+ . This tool allows users to assess their level of information literacy skills, consult an overview of their strengths and weaknesses as individuals and as part of a group, and obtain a list of resources to help them improve their skills. The development of this tool was funded by the Universite du Quebec and built on research projects carried out at the LICEF Research Center on the topic of competency management in training environments. In this paper, we describe the tool, as well as the results of usability tests conducted with the assistance of 35 university students. Major findings indicate that the students found the tool useful to complete their studies, to know more about themselves, as well as about the information literacy domain. Based on our initial work, a generic shell was recently developed to allow university professors to apply the tool in a variety of other knowledge fields.

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