ETS (who do the SATs, GREs, etc.) comes up with an information literacy test... educational institutions want to know if students are up to scratch.

Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital By TOM ZELLER Jr. Published: January 17, 2005

"The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students' ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms....

...Knowing where and how to find information, they agreed, was just the beginning. Interpreting, sorting, evaluating, manipulating and repackaging information in dozens of forms from thousands of sources - as well as having a fundamental understanding of the legal and ethical uses of digital materials - are also important components."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/technology/17test.html?ex=1106888400&en=fe1369fd2fd3ccc2&ei=5070

It starts out with a general statement about research:

"There was a time when researching a high school or college term paper was a far simpler thing. A student writing about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, might have checked out a book on the history of aviation from the local library or tucked into the family's dog-eared Britannica. An ambitious college freshman might have augmented the research by looking up some old newspaper clips on microfilm or picking up a monograph in the stacks.

Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these and thousands of other potential resources on the Internet - and, as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff."