Exploring Evidence-Based Information Literacy

Significant resources are spent in higher education libraries on designing and implementing programmes to ensure that graduates are information literate. An emerging challenge for libraries is to determine how effective these programmes are, and to assess whether the resources supporting them are being well used.

The recent publication of the Information Skills Survey (Catts, 2003) has provided an evidence-based test instrument for evaluating law, education and social science students’ information literacy skills. However, there is currently no equivalent instrument for the sciences, including medicine.

This paper reports on research conducted with medical students at The University of Western Australia that aimed to validate the Information Skills Survey for medical information literacy programmes. Discussion includes the research process and how the implications of the research will affect information literacy programmes in the future.