THE INABILITY OF POST-SECONDARY STUDENTS TO USE ONLINE SEARCH TOOLS SUCCESSFULLY 1

Abstract

Post-secondary students, despite growing up around computers and feeling extremely comfortable and confident about using them, are entering college with poor search habits, lacking the needed skills to do online searchingsuccessfully. This affects their abilities to find suitable materials for both classroom work and everyday life research. When coupled with a reluctance to even admit their skills are inadequate, and an unwillingness to try methods which may be more complex, unfamiliar, and hard to understand,they are failing to take advantage of the databases and services available to them, and failing to produce advanced work.

Several academic research studies over a course of many years have produced results supporting this conclusion. Some studies have focused on discovering, presenting and analyzing the problems. However, others have studied not only in what ways the students are deficient, but offered means by which student abilities to do online searching can beimproved.

The Inability of Post-Secondary Students to use Online Search Tools Successfully, and Some Possible Solutions

Today’s college students were likely born between 1989 and1993. By then, the computer was well on its way frombeing an office workstationlinkedto a room-sized mainframe to becoming “personal.” In 1989, Timothy Berners-Lee first suggested the World Wide Web (World Wide Web Consortium, 2011).

By the time these children began elementary school (1994-1998), Windows was becoming ubiquitous, and the World Wide Web was changing everyone’s lives. They have not known life without computers, and they were using them much younger than anyone would’ve expected. They’ve even been called “digital natives,” “those who grow up immersed in digital technologies, for whom a life fully integrated with digital devices is the norm” (Youth and Media, 2011). As Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg observed in 2011, “a parade of new digital technologies has been a constant feature in most of their lives” (Head, p. Introduction).

This familiarity with computers continued as these children became students. A 2002 survey noted that 86% of college students used the internet; with almost half of them first using it in high school or earlier. One fifth began using a computer between the ages of 5 and 8 years old, and “nearly three-quarters (73%) of college students say they use the Internet more than the library, while only 9% said they use the library more than the Internet for information searching” (Jones, p. 2).

With such a background,we would expect these “born-digital” students to use online search media and tools far more successfully than non-digital natives. However, studies are revealing this is not necessarily the case. Post-secondary students, despite growing up using computers, seem to enter college with poor search habits, lacking the needed skills to do successful online searching. They may not realize their skills are deficient, so may be unwillingto change their methods. They settle for what’s quick and direct, don’t know what they don’t know, and think they know more than they do, yet rarely ask for help from those best able to give it.

The ability to successfully search online sources for appropriate and usable material is one aspect of “information literacy,” “the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand”(National Forum on Information Literacy, 2011, p. What is the NFIL?). This ability, or the lack of it, has been the subject of many studies. This paper will analyze some of these studies and possible solutions.

In the modern world, research has been part-and-parcel of being a student, with the accompanying reports and papers. Before the electronic age, this was done by visiting school, local, and university libraries for reference, primary, and secondary sources, taking copious notes, then coalescing the findings into a single written project.

As the electronic world expanded and research material began to be available from a desktop (now laptop/tablet) computer, teachers, parents, and librarians expected student skills to transfer to the keyboard, particularly for thosewho had never known a world without computers. When academic and public libraries began subscribing to fee-based databases in lieu of print-based references such as the “Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature,” students with their inherent computer skills were expected to be able to access those databases with ease.

However, as students began to use these tools, librarians noticed that the students were not asking the right questions, coming in with the right foundation information, or finding the answers they needed. In 2005, the Educational Testing Service did a major study, the “ICT (information and communication technology) Literacy Assessment Test.” This study tested 3,000 college and 800 high school students, and confirmed what librarians had already realized: students did not know how to do research. The study concluded that only 13% of the students were “information literate”(Na, 2006, para. 2).

Since then, commercialsubscription databases have become common in both public and academic libraries, and web-based open-access search engines have refined their interfaces, algorithms and content to become more usable. The name of one such search engine has even become a generic term for using any search engine. Users don’t say they’re going to research something, they say they’re going to “google it.”

Among the studies completed after the 2005 ETS study is Research and Markets’ 2009 survey, “The Survey of American College Students: Student Evaluation of Information Literacy Instruction.” This report surveyed more than 400 full-time college students in the United States. While the full report is available for purchase only, selected information is available at their website and via press releases.

According to the survey, “55% of students in the sample felt that they were reasonably competent in using the various online databases offered by their college” (Research and Markets, 2009, para. 8). However, this view must be mitigated by the understanding that according to Melissa Gross and Don Latham, students cannot necessarily accurately ascertain what they do not know. In a July 2009 article Gross and Lathamrelated results of their study of college freshmen. In interviewing 20 students, they asked what information-seeking skills the studentsmight like to improve. One student answered, “I honestly don’t know how much greater information literacy needs to be, even on a higher research level… I think once you learn the basic level there isn’t a ton of room for improvement” (Gross, p. 342)

William Badke commented on this study in 2010, when he noted that although only one of the twenty students scored in the ‘advanced” level of the ILT (Information Literacy Test), “most students viewed their own skills as adequate. Yet the students in the study showed little of the advanced knowledge and skills required to be truly proficient in information literacy, and any query about what skills they needed to acquire drew almost a complete blank” (Badke, p. Dunning-Kruger).

This lack of awareness can cause other problems later. In a survey of student information literacy skills of incoming freshmen at an Australian university, Fiona Salisbury and Sharon Karasmanis noted that “prior to entering university, students expect their skills to be adequate. However, if a mismatch of skills means their first encounter with library search tools is negative, their confidence in using the library is quickly eroded” (Salisbury, 2011, p. 46). They will revert to what they do know and feel confident in – Google and Wikipedia, and refuse to try new methods.In the Salisbury study, “the results show that first, second, and third preferences were Google, friend, and book” (Salisbury, 2011, p. 48).

Most recent is a series of studies by the ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project. Begunwith a LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) grant in 2008, this two-year study recently published its findings, as “College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know.” The studysurveyed 156 students at five Illinois universities,and interviewedselected faculty and staff. Studying both online and library research, it used various research methods to delve deeply into which sources students use, and how they access those sources, including observation of students doing actual searches. While previous studies had found many of the same results as the ERIAL project did, this series provided further in-depth analysis and revealed additional information. The results were published in a book in August, but local libraries have not yet processed copies for access. However, Steve Kolowichof Inside Higher Ed spoke with many of the faculty and staff participants, as well as with Andrew Asher, an anthropology professor who led the project.

Although many students were aware of subscription databases, they did not display an awareness of how to use them correctly; for example, althoughJSTOR has a lag of 3-4 years between publishing of an article and its availability in JSTOR; students tried to use the database for current information. They tended to treat most subscription databases as they did Google, searching for “any word anywhere,” without refining. “Out of the 30 students Duke and Asher observed doing research, 27 failed to narrow their search criteria at all when doing so would have turned up more helpful returns” (Kolowich, 2011b, p. Exploding the Myth). Worse, if their searching failed to retrieve appropriate results, theysometimes chose to change their topic rather than continue on the same path, or modify their search results (Kolowich, 2011b, p. Exploding the Myth).

However, the study noted that librarians and professors are partially responsible for the disconnect. “For example, a professor might tell students to find “scholarly sources” without considering that students do not actually know what a ‘scholarly source’ is” (Kolowich, 2011b, p. Co-opting the influence).

Lisa O‘Connor and KacySundstrom, who studied whether traditional advertising/marketing techniques might change student research behaviors, noted that “clearly, from findings across all studies, the majority of students do not practice the multi-source, diversified high-information use strategies library and information professionals prescribe” (O’Connor, 2011, p. 352).

Salisbury et al also demonstrated that students do not necessarily understand some of the most basic search tools: Boolean operators. In response to a question designed to test that knowledge by asking which answer would produce the least number of results, “more than one third (38.6%) of respondents chose the correct answer [involving the Boolean operator AND]” (Salisbury, 2011, p. 49). While the authors presented this as a favorable result, it seems that the opposite is true; because almost two-thirds of respondents didn’t know how to limit results. (The second most common answer was a single term, indicating that respondents perhaps thought AND addedresults, not restricted them.)

While these surveys highlight deficiencies in online searching skills, whatthey sometimes lack is an acknowledgement that students do learn, and they do bring to college an initial set of skills. “Students start with what is known, refine their existing skills and become more conscious of what is not known whilst learning new skills. The more academic libraries understand and recognize prior skills, the more easily meaningful programs can be developed to complement and build on the students’ existing skill base. (Salisbury, 2011, p. 45)

One such skill is the ability to do initial searches with Google et al. “Google is an ‘ingrained ‘coping behaviour’ for university students that is preferred because it is familiar and simplistic, and makes up for a poor understanding of how to develop sophisticated searching strategies” (Salisbury, 2011, p. 46). As Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg realized in 2011, “Even the most poorly constructed search queries are likely to return results when search engines are used. But, making sense of the results – deciding and prioritizing relevance – is more complex and challenging. (Head, p. Critical to a Fault)”

Head and Eisenberg also noted that students had at least a basic idea that websites should be evaluated for authority, as theywere aware of the importance of assessing sites for timeliness. “More than half of the respondents (54%) considered the currency of Web content (e.g., checking the data in footer details.) (Head, 2011, p. Critical to a Fault)”

While most studies surveyed a single group of students/faculty during a single time period, Margaret Fain, at Coastal Carolina University, studied five years of incoming freshmen usingpretests at the beginning of the semester and posttests at the end. The study explored, among other aspects, whether students whose classes required use of library resources showed more substantial increases in IL test scores over each semester.

During the instruction session, students identified appropriate databases for their topic, either from the library webpage or a ChantSource page, conducted a basic search and then emailed themselves an appropriate article. In 2002-2004, students in English 101 recognized a general interest database 49-76% of the time on the pretest and 88-96% the time on the posttest. In 2006-2007, students in University 110 recognized the name of general interest database 16-17% of the time on the pretest and 43-50% of the time on the posttest.

However, the authors also noted that “student comments in instruction sessions reveal a reliance on Internet based resources to the exclusion of article databases” (Fain, 2011, p. 116).

Another reason for the improvement in databaseawareness may have been the increase in availability. “In 2002, the library subscribed to 25 online databases; by 2007, there were over 75, and new ones were being added each month” (Fain, 2011, p. 116). Additionally, the number of available journals increased. “At the height of print journal subscriptions, Kimbel Library subscribed to just over 1000 print journals. By 2007 the library subscribed to half that number.” [However, by 2007] the library provided online access to over 10,000 full-text journals (Fain, 2011, p. 116).

While these studies and others analyzed how students did not use online searching tools efficiently, others tested how this problem might be remedied or mitigated, and which methods could be most effective in teaching students better ways to search.

Lisa O’Connor and KacyLundstromled a study which tested whether giving students a 50-minute traditional instruction session (how to search the library catalogs and research databases) would be more or less successful than a session using “social marketing” (“the application of commercial marketing techniques to the resolution of social and health problems”) (O’Connor, 2011, p. 353). Using the principles of “product, price, place, and promotion” (O’Connor, 2011, p. 356),) they focused on three objectives:

  • Decrease procrastination due to the illusion of immediacy (“the illusion that appropriate information is always immediately available” (O’Connor, 2011, p. 353).)
  • Increase students’ willingness to seek expert assistance when it is warranted
  • Increase the selection of information sources based on criteria other than the information need itself, which includes the habituated and automatic use of Internet sources based on the assumption that they are more convenient, reliable, and easy to use. (O’Connor, 2011, p. 356)

As an example, toward achieving the first objective, students received messages emphasizing the importance of allowing time for each step of the student research assignment: “images of a flea market and a department store were contrasted to illustrate visually the distinctions between the web and the library. Students were asked to look at the two images and decide which one they would use if they had to purchase a dress or suit quickly. Analogies were drawn to “shopping” for information in a place where everything is organized, of good quality, and staffed by well-trained consultants’ (O’Connor, 2011, p. 358).

The study determined that for the first two objectives, the students who received the social marketing messages improved more than the traditional instruction group, and both groups improved similarly for the third objective.

The American Library Association, focusing on traditional instructional methods, offers a book of exercises to be given to students: “Teaching Information Literacy: 50 Standards-Based Exercises for College Students.” “Designed for use as either a full-semester course or as a single focused seminar or workshop, these 50 lessons show students how to engage with electronic and print information resources alike”(State News Service, 2010, para. 2).

La Trobe University Library in Victoria, Australia, in response to Salisbury’s 2009 study, has sponsored“the development of an online self-assessment quiz … in selected cornerstone subjects in each Faculty. The quiz questions will provide students with an indication of their skill level and will alert them to the threshold skills required for starting research at university. (Salisbury, 2011, p. 53)”