Thursday, August 06, 2009

The Survey of American College Students: Student Library Research Practices & Skills

This report ($100 to download!!) looks closely at the research practices and skills of a sample of 400 U.S. college students. I can't justify the money, but there are a few findings summarized in the abstract:

- Only about 47% of students are sure that they have ever been required to turn in a research paper exceeding 10 double spaced typed pages in length for any of their classes.

- More than 86% of students say that they understand the concept of plagiarism 'well' or 'very well'.

- 64% of students sampled say that they know how to contact a librarian online.

- 55.2% of the students in the sample had not asked for help from a librarian within the past year.

- Nearly 29% of students say that Google, Yahoo and other major search engine searches were the most important information source for their last research assignment.

- More than 9% of information needed for research papers was sourced from Wikipedia or other wickis.

- The higher the grade point average the less information for research papers was obtained from search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

1 comment:

Research Papers Writing said...

Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.