Society Is Dumbing Down

That's the assertion from a new study out of England looking at the online searching habits of Generation Google, those kids born after 1993 and the first to grow up with no recollection of a pre-Internet world. (Hat tip: STATS blog)

Research into how children and young people become competent in using the internet and other research tools is patchy but some consistent themes are beginning to emerge:

the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems
internet research shows that the speed of young people's web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority
young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analyzing which key words might be more effective
faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them

It turns out that the best way to obtain information literacy skills is through learning from highly educated parents. Otherwise, students seem to use Google as a coping mechanism to get by.

The kicker:

...deep log studies show that, from undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, `flicking' behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down.

Trevor Butterworth at STATS describes the findings succinctly:

...information isn't going to set you free unless you know how to find it, and the best chance of having those "information skills' is to have highly-educated parents who can impart what they learned before the advent of the Internet.

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