• 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.

I don’t have any real qualms over the terms used, as long as we recognise that when we’re using them we’re making generalisations and probably being ever-so-slightly reductionist. There is room for generalisation in anything — that, after all, is how analysis occurs: we interrogate material, look for patterns, and then organise it so that we can eventually create new meaning for ourselves.

But the question is nevertheless raised: How much are we describing behaviours that are peculiar to a specific age group, and how much are we describing the behaviours of anyone who spends a lot of time online? The CIBER team at University College London have gone some way to beginning to answer this question (see my previous post), but the fact remains that for most teachers their new learners will be young people, and, as such, the descriptions still hold good.