Reliability and validity of self-efficacy scales assessing students’ information literacy skills: A systematic review

Abstract

Purpose

This paper systematically reviews the evidence of reliability and validity of scales available in studies that reported surveys of students to assess their perceived self-efficacy of information literacy (IL) skills.

Design/methodology/approach

Search in two subject and two general databases and scanning of titles, abstracts and full texts of documents have been carried out in this paper.

Findings

In total, 45 studies met the eligibility criteria. A large number of studies did not report any psychometric characteristics of data collection instruments they used. The selected studies provided information on 22 scales. The instruments were heterogeneous in number of items and type of scale options. The most used reliability measure was internal consistency (with high values of Cronbach’s alpha), and the most used validity was face/content validity by experts.

Practical implications

The culture of using good-quality scales needs to be promoted by IL practitioners, authors and journal editors.

Originality/value

This paper is the first review of its kind, which is useful for IL stakeholders.

Citation

Mahmood, K. (2017), "Reliability and validity of self-efficacy scales assessing students’ information literacy skills: A systematic review", The Electronic Library, Vol. 35 No. 5, pp. 1035-1051. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-03-2016-0056