College Students Not Such Good Googlers
October 4, 2011
I read an interesting article the other day based on a series of studies conducted by five Illinois universities known as the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries Project. The study was conducted over the last two years in order to better understand college students’ study habits. So far the findings have not been data that will get some 20 somethings jobs.
Apparently, not only do most students rarely utilize the help of librarians or even set foot in their school library, but even more surprisingly, the so-called tech-savvy millennial generation isn’t better at using Google than any other age group. In the Mashable Tech article, The Google Gap: College Students Aren’t Good at Searching, Sarah Kessler reported:
One hundred and fifty-six students who were interviewed at the five schools about their research habits mentioned Google more than any database. The 60 students who participated in a “research process interview” — with researchers following them around the library as they searched for information — frequently used the search engine poorly. And when they used other databases, they expected them to work the same way that Google does.
If accurate, search services that spoon feed “predicted” information to the graduates are in a position to control what these bright young folks thing, understand, and cogitate upon. Talk about controlling the conversation. The predictive results crowd are the conversation captains. The users are the rowers of the digital trireme.
While this article emphasizes the problem being that students are unable to narrow their search results when using the search engine, which may be true, I’d like to point you to another article which, in my opinion, gets at the real issue. Librarians are not seen as academic experts who are there to help students with their assignments, but rather as bodies used to point to different sections of the stacks. I believe that in order to improve students study habits, colleges and universities must show students the important role that librarians play in our academic institutions.
Jasmine Ashton, October 4, 2011
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