Factors affecting middle school students’ information literacy in the internet plus education environment

Information literacy facilitates student learning and developing in the open education environment, while factors such as learning environment, technical support, and core competencies are critical to enhance the literacy. This study conducted a 2-year follow-up experiment with a sample of 2084 students to investigate how the Internet Plus education environment affect students’ information literacy in a middle school from west part of China. A two-level linear model was constructed to analyze the class and student factors affecting students’ information literacy. The results indicated that students’ collaborative skills, problem-solving ability, and daily online time significantly affected their information literacy. However, teacher’s gender, years of working, management style, and information literacy did not positively relate to students’ information literacy. Meanwhile, class size had an indirect effect on students’ information literacy via students’ problem-solving ability, collaborative skills, daily online time, and frequency of electronic device use.