Project Information Literacy

Today's post isn't related to LAMP or diversity directly, but it's very relevant to anyone doing research at a university, both librarians and students.

Project Information Literacy (http://projectinfolit.org/) which brings together a lot of new data (2009) on the research behaviors of young adults/university students. It includes research on undergrads' use of Wikipedia, finding that most students use Wikipedia at the beginning of their research to get an overview but not towards the end of their research (that makes librarians happy to hear!).

On the PiL site, you can also find a full report on how college students in the "digital age" seek information. PiL surveyed over 2,000 students at six U.S. colleges in Spring 2009. Some findings I found interesting:

• Almost every student in the sample turned to course readings first—not Google—for course-related research assignments.
• Not surprisingly, Google and Wikipedia were the go-to sites for everyday life research for nearly every respondent.
  
• Librarians were tremendously underutilized by students. 8 out of 10 of the respondents reported rarely, if ever, turning to librarians for help with course-related research assignments.
• BUT....9 out of 10 students in the sample turned to libraries for certain online scholarly research databases (such as those provided by EBSCO, JSTOR, or ProQuest) for conducting course-related research.

What this says to me is that college students turn to librarians when Wikipedia and Google aren't enough and they need credible articles from (complicated) databases. Interestingly, the study also showed that college students in 2009 have different reasons for procrastinating than students in the 1980s:

• The reasons why students procrastinate are no longer driven by the same pre-Internet fears of failure and a lack of confidence that once were part of the college scene in the 1980s. Instead, we found that most of the digital natives in the sample (40%) tended to delay work on assignments as they juggled their needs to meet competing course demands from other classes.

It sounds like the "multitasking generation" is less concerned about doing a good job and more concerned about just getting the job done. Has college become more about busy work? Or have digital resources produced more access to information without more skills in critical thinking?

Since I'm procrastinating right now myself, I thought this video from Project InfoLit's Video Blog was fitting...