Revisiting the relationship between information literacy and academic writing: Evidence from a self-assessment scale

Abstract

Although information literacy and academic writing have been considered associated abilities in the higher education context, the degree to which these two abilities are associated remains inconclusive. To add empirical evidence on the relationship between information literacy and academic writing, the present study drew on graduate students' responses to a self-assessment scale that measures the abilities of information literacy and academic writing processes and examined their relationship at the integrated and individual process levels. The two integrated constructs are highly correlated with a correlation coefficient of 0.815. The individual processes of information literacy and academic writing are correlated with moderately high to high coefficients, ranging from 0.548 to 0.755, which means that the processes of information literacy and academic writing are closely related. Evaluating and understanding information in information literacy processes are more associated with writing processes, suggesting that they are crucial in connecting these two constructs and making them an integrated process. This study is original in using a scale that treats information literacy and academic writing as an integrated process to reflect the real-world situation and goes beyond the textual evaluation of these two abilities.