Who(m?) of us would have answered differently at age 18?
When one has nothing to compare against except one's own saticficing, of course one will report that one is good at something.
It's not enough (I posit it is misleading) to ask people at age 18 their opinions of themselves and their skills and abilities. The trick is to pre-test, attempt to educate, and post-test to determine what learning happened - and adjust the attempts to educate accordingly.
On the other hand, the "the user is not broken" school of thought suggests/indicates certain systems lack efficacy, and therefore increase irrelevance of certain resources. What needs to change in order to provide the effects expected by the age 18 (or an arguably research-process-naïve) user?
-Aaron
:-)'
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
> Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 12:00 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Wikipedia editorial policy changes signal
> maturity
>
>
> Shawne Miksa said:
>
> "Undergraduates---coming in at age 18, having grown up using the
> Internet and the Web--are hard pressed when it comes to distinguishing
> a reliable source of information from an unreliable ('free and easy' or
> not) source. The fact that it comes from the Web seems to be good
> enough. Of course, there are many variables working here, especially
> what education they received and where they received it."
>
> There's an interesting recent Educause study that found that
> undergraduates consider themselves to be skilled when it comes to using
> the Internet to find reliable information (the study involved roughly
> 30,000 undergrads). Here's an excerpt:
>
> "In this year’s survey, ECAR once again asked three survey questions
> about information literacy derived from the Association of College and
> Research Libraries (ACRL) ‘Information Literacy Competency Standards
> for Higher Education'...Results show that, overall, respondents
> considered themselves quite savvy Internet users...Eight out of 10
> students (80%) were very confident in their ability to search the
> Internet effectively and efficiently; almost half (45.1%) rated
> themselves very skilled, and another third (34.9%) rated themselves as
> experts. Although students’ assessment of their ability to evaluate the
> reliability and credibility of online information and to understand
> related ethical and legal issues is lower, overall ratings were still
> high".
>
> Here's some info extracted from Table 4-5 of the report:
>
> * When asked to assess their use of the Internet to effectively and
> efficiently search for information the students rated themselves at
> 4.12 on a five point scale.
> * When asked to assess their ability to evaluate the reliability and
> credibility of online sources of information the students rated
> themselves at 3.66 on a five point scale.
>
> (Scale: 1 = not at all skilled; 2 = not very skilled; 3 = fairly
> skilled; 4 = very skilled; 5 = expert)
>
> So, they see themselves as "very skilled" at locating info on the
> Internet, and closer to "very skilled" than to "fairly skilled" when it
> comes to evaluating the reliability and credibility of the info they
> find.
>
> Bernie Sloan
>
>
>
Received on Mon Oct 26 2009 - 12:32:21 EDT