Factors associated with teachers' competence to develop students’ information literacy: A multilevel approach

Cultivating students' information literacy is becoming increasingly important for teachers in the 21st century; however, teachers' competence to develop students' information literacy (TCDSIL) is far from satisfying. To foster TCDSIL, its influencing factors and promotion strategies need to be studied. However, prior studies on TCDSIL mainly investigate the influencing factors from a single-level perspective and neglect the potential relationship of school context on TCDSIL. In order to fill this gap and provide a deeper understanding of the complex system of TCDSIL, this study surveyed 9909 teachers in 1286 primary and secondary schools and used a two-level hierarchical linear model to analyze the survey data. The analysis results indicated that both teacher characteristics and school context have a significant relationship with TCDSIL. Among school-related factors, school type, resources for instruction, and network bandwidth have positively significant relationships with TCDSIL. Moreover, teachers' perceived usefulness, information processing skills (the skills of information access, information usage, and information management), and information ethics could predict TCDSIL. This study provides implications regarding how to improve TCDSIL, including paying attention to the gap between primary school teachers and secondary school teachers; enriching school's digital teaching resources; ensuring school network quality; enhancing teachers' perceived usefulness of ICT, information processing skills, and information ethics.