College students and high-school students preparing to enter college are sorely lacking in the skills needed to retrieve, analyze, and communicate information available online, according to preliminary findings released last week by the Educational Testing Service.
A study by the nonprofit testing group looked at the scores of about 3,000 college students and 800 high-school students on a new ETS test designed to measure their information literacy and computer savvy. The test is called the ICT Literacy Assessment Core Level. “ICT” stands for “information and communication technology.”
According to the preliminary report, only 13 percent of the test takers were information literate. ETS set what company officials described as a rough, unofficial information-literacy bar using data from a variety of sources, including the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Students at four-year colleges fared best on the test, followed by high-school seniors preparing to enter four-year colleges, and community-college students after them. High-school seniors preparing to enter community colleges had the lowest scores.
ETS unveiled the study at an information-literacy conference in Washington aimed at drumming up nationwide support for information-literacy standards and a curriculum in schools and colleges. The testing service was among five groups sponsoring the one-day conference.
Presenting the study’s findings were Irvin R. Katz, a senior research scientist in ETS’s research-and-development division, and Teresa Egan, a project manager in the organization’s higher-education division. The two stressed that the findings were neither authoritative nor thorough, but they said the findings did offer some indication that students need more training in information literacy.
The 44 institutions that agreed to offer the test to their students did so voluntarily, and the students who took it were volunteers as well.
No Gender Difference
The study also revealed that male and female students performed at the same level on the test. And while students at four-year colleges outperformed community-college students on information literacy in three subjects — business, education, and health services — the two groups fared the same on computer and information-science skills.
Among the study’s findings, the ETS labeled the following as “good":
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Students generally recognized that Web sites whose addresses ended in ".edu” or ".gov” were less likely to contain biased material than those with addresses ending in .com.
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Students typically favored printed material over Web sites for authoritative information.
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When searching a database of journal articles for a research project, 63 percent of students identified reasonably relevant materials.
The testing service labeled the following findings as “bad":
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Some students were all too willing to believe printed materials, failing to distinguish authoritative from mass-market sources.
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Students were generally poor at identifying biased Web content.
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When searching a database, only half of students played down irrelevant results.
Besides ETS, the conference’s sponsors were the National Forum on Information Literacy, a group of academic and professional organizations; the National Education Association; the Committee for Economic Development, a nonprofit policy group; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce.
At the end of the conference, officials suggested that information literacy be included in the No Child Left Behind Act and in national discussions on higher-education reform.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 53, Issue 10, Page A36