Students struggle with information literacy

EdNA's Recent Items RSS pointed to an article in eSchool News that references a interesting results from a study of high school and college student's information literacy. Unfortunately I couldn't get a link to the actual published results as eSchool News wanted me to register before reading the rest of the article.. no wonder bloggers kick linkless journalists. I did manage to grab this though:

The report comes from an evaluation of the responses of 6,300 students from 63 institutions around the country to ETS's new ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Literacy Assessment. Students were given scenario-based items that were presented to them in 75-minute test environments. These information literacy tests included extracting information from a database, developing a spreadsheet, or composing eMail summaries of research findings.

The tests are meant to measure students' abilities to overcome three challenges they typically have:

"The ability to identify trustworthy and useful information;

"The ability to manage overabundant information; and

"The ability to communicate information effectively

The study found that 52 percent of those tested could correctly judge the objectivity of a web site, and 65 percent could correctly judge that web site's authoritativeness. But only 40 percent of students entered multiple search terms when researching a topic, and only 44 percent properly identified a statement that captured the demands of the assignment.

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