How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age
(PROJECT INFORMATION LITERACY PROGRESS REPORT)
Students still need the help with the basic skills that teacher-librarians have always taught: defining the topic, narrowing the search, and filtering the results.
"For over three-fourths (84%) of the students surveyed, the most difficult step of the course-related research process was getting started. Defining a topic (66%), narrowing it down (62%), and filtering through irrelevant results (61%) frequently hampered students in the sample, too. Follow-up interviews suggest students lacked the research acumen for framing an inquiry in the digital age where information abounds and intellectual discovery was paradoxically overwhelming for them." (Head and Eisenberg 2010)
Read the full report here:
(Recommendations start on p. 37, with suggestions for college librarians. Many suggestions can reasily be adapted to elementary and high school levels.)
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