Viewing and exploring the subject area of information literacy assessment in higher education (2000–2011)

Abstract

This pioneering approach to the subject area of Information Literacy Assessment in Higher Education (ILAHE) aims at gaining further knowledge about its scope from a terminological-spatial perspective and also at weighting and categorizing relevant terms on the basis of levels of similarity. From a retrospective and selective search, the bibliographic references of scientific literature on ILAHE were obtained from the most representative databases (LISA, ERIC and WOS), comprising the period 2000–2011 and restricting results to English language. Keywords in titles, descriptors and abstracts of the selected items were labelled and extracted with Atlas.ti software. The main research topics in this field were determined through a co-words analysis and graphically represented by the software VOSviewer. The results showed two areas of different density and five clusters that involved the following issues: evaluation-education, assessment, students-efficacy, learning-research, and library. This method has facilitated the identification of the main research topics about ILAHE and their degree of proximity and overlapping.