Everyday Research | Peer to Peer Review
Reading the new report from Project Information Literacy Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Apr 7, 2011 |
| Photo by Debora Miller |
Project Information Literacy has just published another interesting analysis of the data it's gathered from over 8000 students across the country, supplemented with focus groups and interviews. In addition to examining how students do research for academic purposes, they asked about everyday life information needs. People in early adulthood, the authors argue, are particularly interesting subjects for study because they face an unusually high number of information needs. Many of those needs are related to their work as students (which is why OCLC's 2005 Perceptions report and its college edition spinoff reported that, of all groups, college students are the heaviest users of libraries), but they are also at a point in life when they are deciding about careers, where to live, who to spend time with, and what kind of people they want to be. They are also the first generation to grow up with the Internet as a constant in their lives.
All of these factors make their ability to conduct inquiry for personal needs a fascinating field of inquiry, especially for those of us whose work is promoting information literacy as a critical learning outcome of college. Though in practice we tend to focus on skills and resources students need right now to complete an assignment that's due in a few weeks, in theory we hope what they learn makes them capable of finding the information they need after college.
Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg, the principle researchers, raise several related queries in their article published this week in First Monday. What kinds of questions do college students ask in everyday life? Where do they seek answers—and how does that choice differ, depending on the type of question? How do they evaluate the sources they find? What part of the process do they find most challenging?
In some ways what they have learned isn't too surprising. Their findings confirm what most of us already suspected, but that doesn't diminish the significance of this study. We simply haven't had a lot of empirical research on people's everyday research processes, and we haven't asked these questions on such a large scale about this population—the very group that our information literacy efforts are for.
What are they looking for?
The category of everyday information sought by students most frequently may disappoint anyone who argues our current college students are self-centered and disengaged. It was: news. The vast majority of students want to know what's happening outside the bubble of their college life. Not as many sought information about current events for instrumental purposes, with fewer than a third conducting research to advocate for a cause. I find that comforting. Students want to know what's going on and aren't necessarily seeking information just to support an agenda. Our politicians and pundits should try the same sometime.
Students also seek information for the reasons the rest of us do: to inform a potential purchase or to plan travel, to learn about health issues, and to find out information useful for a career. They turn most often to the web and to family and friends for this information, but they tended to favor the web for consumer needs and personal connections when their inquiry had to do with spiritual issues. Again, this isn't really that surprising, but it's intriguing that in some areas of everyday life the web functions better as a marketplace for goods than as a marketplace of ideas—which makes me wonder whether "marketplace" is even a useful metaphor for ideas. We're so used to thinking of free market economics as the mainspring of culture we forget Thomas Jefferson's famous observation, "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea."
So students turn to the web to research consumer choices and turn to people when on a spiritual quest. But do they use library resources at all for everyday research? Yes, actually, and this is very encouraging news. About 40 percent of students said they consulted library databases in their everyday life research, and 28 percent used print resources off the library's shelves. So far as I know, there hasn't been any compelling evidence until now that what we teach transfers beyond the immediate information need that we tend to focus on. Considering the amount of effort we invest in helping students find and use information, it's cheering to find out that library resources matter to students when seeking information for non-academic tasks.
A different kind of difficulty
The researchers' previous analysis of academic research processes found that students working on school projects report that getting started and narrowing their focus is the most challenging part of the process, but that's not the case for everyday research. They do very well indeed with the first of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards, defining an information need, when it's based on their personal interests. They don't even have too much trouble finding sources. Where they struggle is in narrowing the options. They think critically about their choice of resources, using a variety of techniques and getting help from friends and family—but find sorting through the multitude of options a challenge. As with their academic research, they tend to rely on the tried and true methods that have worked before.
The authors conclude that students would benefit from learning how to craft more efficient searches and could use more hands-on apprenticeship with the critical evaluation of sources. That last factor tends to get slighted in our time-constrained teaching opportunities.
Here's perhaps another role librarians might play: helping faculty think more broadly about the role of research in the curriculum, emphasizing portable skills that students will be able to use as they conduct research in the future. Is there room in academic programs for involving students in service learning opportunities in which they could put their skills and our resources to use in solving community members' everyday information needs? Could students be encouraged to compose their ideas in genres other than traditional research papers? Students need to be able to see how sources function in everyday texts such as news articles, blog posts, and in consumer health information. In the long run, those everyday contexts are where being information literate will matter the most.
Next up . . .
Head and Eisenberg have done us all a great service in organizing and interpreting far more data about student experiences, collecting more data than we've ever had before. I'm pleased to see that they are already at work on another project: interviewing hundreds of students about how they handle research during the "crunch time" at the end of the term when they are feverishly working on several projects with tight deadlines. They will particularly explore multitasking and the "individualized information spaces" they create on their digital devices. I'll be looking forward to the results, to be released next fall. Meanwhile, I'll be thinking about how to share this study with our faculty and what the implications are for our instruction collaborations.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
