So I write this as an academic who actually has read and cited Drs. Dunning and Kruger's (in)famous work. This is a little off the cuff so it isn't going to have the citations it should.
The generalized thing that the authors are talking about is information literacy. It is the process that includes not just understanding the information but identifying the need for information, locating it, understanding the information, evaluating the information, and then applying the information to some affect. Interestingly, it has found a home primarily within the libraries because...well they are really solid place to go for how information is organized.
“Making search easier for students can therefore be a double-edged sword: while it enables students to get to information faster and easier, it can also reinforce unreflective research habits that contribute little to the overall synthesis of a research paper or academic argument.” [0]
More broadly from research I have been involved in on student information literacy, self report data is spectacularly garbage because of underlying misconceptions students' hold about what they did. One semi-famous observational study showed that students strongly conflate finding a piece of information with understanding it. That was a 'whoa' moment for me. Cognitive conflation of access to a piece of information and deep coherent understanding of it. Houston...well you know the rest.
I personally attribute that in large part to fundamental problems in how we as a society think about education. This is philisophical about how we fail to differentiate transmission of information from the development of insights and understanding. We teach information as if it is both of those things. Science, as much as people scream otherwise isn't facts. Facts are the result of science. There is a lot of other work showing it is really hard to get faculty to change teaching practices. The reality is it doesn't matter. Society, not just teachers, need to think about information different and think about knowledge different ly for us to break out of this loop.
[A]Dimmock, N. (2013). Hallmarks of a good paper. In N.F. Foster (Ed.), Studying students: A second look (7-17). Chicago: ACRL.