Students' perceptions of their information literacy skills: the confidence gap between male and female international graduate students

Abstract

In the 2015 Summer Session I, the information literacy team combined two instruments, the Information Literacy Assessment (ILA) and the Students' Perceptions of Their Information Literacy Skills Questionnaire (SPIL-Q), into one survey and distributed it to the college's international graduate students through a Google Form. It was distributed to 932 international graduate students, and 172 valid respondents completed the survey. The purpose of this research was to compare the confidence gap in information literacy skills between men and women, particularly in international graduate students. Data collected illustrated that female international business students (n=70) tended to be slightly more confident than their male counterparts (n=102) regarding their perceived information literacy skills as evidenced by their SPIL-Q average score across all six IL topics, 3.78, vs. male student's average score of 3.58.