“It wasn’t so much that students were inefficient in their use of Google, but rather that students are often ill-equipped to sufficiently evaluate or refine the results that are returned,” says Andrew Asher, an anthropologist at Bucknell University and one of the project leads. “…I don’t think this is a problem limited to students.”
“They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results,” adds an article on the study by Inside Higher Ed. “Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)”
Just want to say that I deal with this every day. For being the children supposedly born ready to use technology, my current students are awful at researching, word processing, and file management in general. They are also the first generation to have gone from beginning to finish in the No Child Left Behind program.
These kids can't think critically and have been spoon fed information for tests and from basic search queries their whole lives. They need to be asked much more often to read in context and question the validity of what they read about.
Of course, this is only one study... but I have a confirmation bias because the majority of my students have this issue.
Democracy is worthless with an uninformed public.
