Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Survey of American College Students

For 68 Euros you could purchase the March 2009 54-page publication The Survey of American College Students: Student Evaluation of Information Literacy Instruction produced by the Primary Research Group. "This report presents approximately 125 tables of data exploring how full time college students in the United States view and use and evaluate their college library’s information literacy training. The data in the report is based on a representative sample of more than 400 full time college students in the United States." They have a few highlights listed at http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.asp?
report_id=835323&t=t&cat_id=
This includes "20.3% of students majoring in the social sciences thought of themselves as highly competent but only 4.17% of students majoring in education thought of themselves this way, a particularly frightening statistic, given that many of these students will become the next generation of primary school teachers." However, it could just be that the education students have a more realistic idea of their competence ... From the list of tables, one sees that tables include % of students who had information literacy training, broken out by things like family income level and "level of religiosity" as well as subject, level of study etc.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Keukenhof, Netherlands, April 2009.

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