In a recent post I pointed to CIBER’s report on Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf) which showed that Net Gen behaviours aren’t necessarily specific to one discrete age group. Nevertheless, the report did present some findings about the search activities of the younger demographic:
- The fit between search engines and students’ life styles today is ‘almost perfect’ — much better than is the fit for physical or online libraries (p. 7)
- The speed of young people’s web searching indicates that they spend little time in evaluating information for accuracy, relevance or authority (p. 12). But this also seems to be a pre-Web phenomenon (p. 23)
- There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before (p. 12)
- Young scholars are using tools that require little skill and are satisfied with very basic forms of searching (p. 14)
- Young people find it difficult to assess relevance when presented with a long string of hits (p. 12)
- It is likely that young people have good parallel processing skills, but it is unclear whether they are similarly developing the sequential processing abilities required for ordinary reading (p. 18)
- There is no evidence that young people are expert searchers. Studies pre-Web also reported that young people had difficulty in selecting search terms. (p. 22)
- There has been an increase in full-phrase searching, but this, too, predates the Web (p. 22)
I think the most important thing we need to take away from this report is the notion that the lack of sophistication and critique that characterises young people’s information searching is not a new phenomenon, brought about by being online: rather, youngsters have always had trouble evaluating and assessing information for relevance — perhaps it’s just that now their information searching behaviour is more public.
Tags: CIBER, Digital literacy, Net Gen, Target
