Children searchers; First year students

Articles in the latest issue of the priced journal, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology:
- Foss, E. et al. (2012) "Children's search roles at home: Implications for designers, researchers, educators, and parents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63 (3), 558–573. "This paper presents the results of a large-scale, qualitative study conducted in the homes of children aged 7, 9, and 11 investigating internet searching processes on Google. Seven search roles, representing distinct behavior patterns displayed by children when interacting with the Google search engine, are described, including Developing Searchers, Domain-specific Searchers, Power Searchers, Nonmotivated Searchers, Distracted Searchers, Rule-bound Searchers, and Visual Searchers. Other trends are described and selected to present a view of the whole child searcher. These roles and trends are used to make recommendations to designers, researchers, educators, and parents about the directions to take when considering how to best aid children to become search literate."
- Gross, M. and Latham, D. (2012) "What's skill got to do with it?: Information literacy skills and self-views of ability among first-year college students."Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63 (3), 574–583. "This study replicates a previous study based on work in psychology, which demonstrates that students who score as below proficient in information literacy (IL) skills have a miscalibrated self-view of their ability. Simply stated, these students tend to believe that they have above-average IL skills, when, in fact, an objective test of their ability indicates that they are below-proficient in terms of their actual skills. This investigation was part of an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded project and includes demographic data about participants, their scores on an objective test of their information literacy skills, and self-estimates of their ability. Findings support previous research that indicates many students come to college without proficient IL skills, that students with below-proficient IL skills have inflated views of their ability, and that this miscalibration can also be expressed by students who test as proficient. Implications for research and practice are discussed."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Forsythia, March 2012