Student Perceptions of Information Literacy Skills (PILS) Using The ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

In information literacy (IL) instruction for graduate students, librarians often encounter conflicting understandings of IL from faculty and students. Anecdotally, faculty expect incoming graduate students to be familiar with the process of defining the scope of a research topic; finding, accessing, and evaluating information related to this topic; and synthesizing existing literature into a literature review. Graduate students report to librarians that they feel unprepared and anxious when assigned these tasks. This gap in faculty and student understanding of graduate IL skills creates difficulty for librarians when designing graduate student IL instruction. To more precisely define this gap, Student Perceptions of Information Literacy Skills (PILS) was developed to measure student self-perceptions of information literacy skills. PILS is aligned to the six frames of the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education . Each section assesses student perceptions of skills, concept knowledge, and affect. The instrument can be adapted to measure faculty perceptions of students skills as well. For further information about validity please contact the authors.