US Student Library Research Practices & Skills, a survey
Posted by Celia Walter | 6 Aug, 2009This report
looks closely at the research practices and skills of a sample of 400
U.S. college students. The 150+ page report presents detailed data on
just how American college students use their library to complete
research assignments. The report answers questions such as: which
American students are being assigned research papers and which are not?
What research sources do students use to complete their research
assignments? Which use only major search engines or Wikipedia? Which
use print resources? Library furnished databases? How familiar are
students with the concept of plagiarism? Are students confident in
their research abilities? Do they know how to use citation software? DO
they feel that their librarians help them to use the available
resources?
The study also gives detailed information on how
their professors advise them to use the library, and how comfortable
they feel about their research skills and how helpful librarians have
been in helping them in their research. Data is broken out by more than
16 criteria including gender, income level, type and size of college,
mean SAT acceptance score of the college, and many other variables.
Just a few of the report's many findings are that:
- Only
about 47% of students are sure that they have ever been required to
turn in a research paper exceeding 10 double spaced typed pages in
length for any of their classes.
- More than 86% of students say that they understand the concept of plagiarism 'well' or 'very well'.
- 64% of students sampled say that they know how to contact a librarian online.
- 55.2% of the students in the sample had not asked for help from a librarian within the past year.
-
Nearly 29% of students say that Google, Yahoo and other major search
engine searches were the most important information source for their
last research assignment.
- More than 9% of information needed for research papers was sourced from Wikipedia or other wickis.
-
The higher the grade point average the less information for research
papers was obtained from search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.asp?report_id=1054422&t=d&cat_id=