Desarrollo de competencias informacionales en contextos universitarios: enfoques, modelos y estrategias de intervención

Abstract

Due to its significance in the information society, information literacy must be stressed in institutions of higher education. There is a wealth of research on the instruments employed by such institutions to keep up to date with new challenges regarding information literacy. This study provides a review of the last seven years of literature reporting on information literacy teaching strategies for university students contained in four databases and a single web-portal. Journal articles were classified into three main thematic categories: approaches, models and strategies. The review reveals that the category of approaches is largely dominated by cognitive perspectives at the expense of sociocultural methods. The models identified reflect considerable achievements, but also institutional, economic and administrative burdens that hinder implementation. Strategies appear to be disassociated from proposals entailing educational agents, a situation that undermines their impact. The central weakness of the studies reviewed lies in the assessment instruments used to yield results. The paper concludes posing questions and challenges for field of information science.