An Exploratory Study of the Relationship Between Individual Cognitive Factors and Information Literacy Ability in College Students

To effectively teach information literacy (IL), it is important to understand how an individual’s epistemic motivation influences their decision making, learning, and information processing. Epistemic motivation is the desire to think deeply to gain knowledge and understand the world and can be understood from a developmental theoretical framework which suggests that personal epistemic beliefs develop as a student matures from youth to adulthood. Various cognitive dispositions, such as Need for Cognition, have been used to assess aspects of epistemic motivation. This research explored the relationships among dimensions of epistemic motivation and their predictive influence on IL ability in a sample of college students. The results showed that Actively Open-minded Thinking, Need for Cognition, and Need for Cognitive Closure all significantly predicted IL scores after controlling for age and gender. This mixed result warrants deeper investigation and may partially be explained by the method and instrument used for measuring IL ability. The results from this study can help librarians enhance their IL instruction by aligning instructional content with characteristics of students’ cognitive development. Further, the findings can inform IL instruction that helps students recognize their own epistemological positions and build new understandings as they advance to subsequent stages of cognitive development.