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Digital natives are assumed to possess knowledge and skills that allow them to handle information and communication technologies (ICT) tools in a "natural" way. Accordingly, this calls for the application of different teaching/learning strategies in education. The purpose of the study was to test the predictive strength of some attributes of digital nativeness (ICT ownership, ICT experiences, internet confidence and number of ICT-rich university courses) on the information literacy (IL) of 299 Slovenian university students. Correlation and regression analysis based on survey data revealed that the attributes of digital natives are poor predictors of IL. The principal findings are: ICT experiences expressed as the sum of the use of different applications do not necessarily contribute to IL; some applications have a positive and some a negative effect; personal ownership of smartphones, portable computers and desktop computers has no direct effect on IL, while ownership of a tablet computer is actually a negative predictor; personal ownership of ICT devices has an impact on ICT experiences and Internet confidence, and, therefore, an indirect impact on IL; and ICT-rich university courses (if not designed to cultivate IL) have only a marginal impact on IL, although they may have some impact on ICT experiences and Internet confidence. The overall conclusion is that digital natives are not necessarily information literate, and that IL should be promoted with hands-on and minds-on courses based on IL standards.

A new information literacy test (ILT) for higher education was developed, tested, and validated. The ILT contains 40 multiple-choice questions (available in Appendix) with four possible answers and follows the recommendations of information literacy (IL) standards for higher education. It assesses different levels of thinking skills and is intended to be freely available to educators, librarians, and higher education managers, as well as being applicable internationally for study programs in all scientific disciplines. Testing of the ILT was performed on a group of 536 university students. The overall test analysis confirmed the ILT reliability and discrimination power as appropriate (Cronbach's alpha 0.74; Ferguson's delta 0.97). The students' average overall achievement was 66%, and IL increased with the year of study. The students were less successful in advanced database search strategies, which require a combination of knowledge, comprehension, and logic, and in topics related to intellectual property and ethics. A group of 163 students who took a second ILT assessment after participating in an IL-specific study course achieved an average posttest score of 78.6%, implying an average IL increase of 13.1%, with most significant improvements in advanced search strategies (23.7%), and in intellectual property and ethics (12.8%). IntroductionAccording to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), information literacy (IL) is defined as an intellectual framework for understanding, finding, evaluating, and using information (ACRL, 2000). For the last two decades, IL competencies and skills have been an important subject in the area of higher education, influencing the design, content, teaching methodology, and management of academic courses. Correspondingly, attempts have been made to systematically develop and outline standards and criteria for the evaluation of IL skills. Recent developments in the field have been comprehensively presented at international conferences on information literacy (Kurbanoglu, Spiranec, Grassian, Mizrachi, & Catts, 2014). Proficiency in IL activities and skills entails fluency with information and communication technology (ICT), investigative methods, logic, critical thinking, discernment, and reasoning. The increasingly rapid development in the field of ICT, however, presents a real challenge for any long-term standardization of evaluation methods. IL Standards in Higher EducationA chronological sequence of main IL standards in higher education is presented in Table 1, comparing their structure and contents. One of the earliest attempts to define information skills, the Big Six (Eisenberg & Berkowitz, 1990), first presented in 1988, derives its structure from an earlier taxonomy of educational objectives. The authors envision six stages in solving an information problem, each divided into two further substages.In a later taxonomy, Bruce (1997Bruce ( , 1999 organizes IL into seven categories (Seven Faces of Information Literacy in Higher Education). One of the more frequ...

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