Information literacy studies have shown that college students use a variety of information sources to perform research and commonly choose Internet sources over traditional library sources. Studies have also shown that students do not appear to understand the information quality issues concerning Internet information sources and may lack the…

Recognizing the importance of designing educational opportunities that draw upon students' prior knowledge and experiences, this paper uses focus groups to explore how Spanish-speaking students in a graduate program at the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence understand academic information literacy practices within their new cultural contexts.…

Courses: Research Methods, Public Speaking, Communication Theory, any other course that requires college students to engage in a formal research process. Can be conducted in traditional, online, or hybrid courses. Objectives: In this original single-class activity, students will be able to evaluate source credibility for resources that extend…

In this article, C. Frederick Risinger begins by describing insights from an article entitled, "Trapped in the Bubble." It reported on a doctoral student's study (along with other students and faculty in Indiana University's School of Informatics) which demonstrated that the more people rely on social media such as Facebook, Twitter,…

This study examines behavioral traits to determine what impact they have on average visit duration when interacting with a website, a major part of search engine and webpage performance metrics commonly reported in practice. A task-based design was created to examine participants' interaction with various websites containing a variety of media and…

Introduction: This paper aims to determine how appropriate information literacy instruction is for preparing students for these unmediated searches using commercial search engines and the Web. Method. A survey was designed using the 2000 Association of College and Research Libraries literacy competency standards for higher education. Survey…

In scientific and academic circles, the value of Google Scholar as an information resource has received much scrutiny. Numerous articles have examined its search ability, but few have asked whether it has the accuracy, authority and currency to be trustworthy enough for scholars. This article takes a look at reliability factors that go into Google…

This "2015 E-Expectations Report" examines the current expectations of college-bound high school students as well as how their expectations have changed over the last decade. The 2015 E-Expectations study polled more than 3,000 high school juniors and seniors, with a 50 percent representation from each class level as well as a 50 percent…

This study assesses and compares the quality of sources found by undergraduate students when doing research using both Google and a library (federated) search tool. Thirty undergraduates were asked to find four sources (one book, two articles, and one additional source of their choosing) related to a selected research topic. Students used both…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…

This study examines the information-seeking behavior of undergraduate students within a research context. Student searches were recorded while the participants used Google and a library (federated) search tool to find sources (one book, two articles, and one other source of their choosing) for a selected topic. The undergraduates in this study…

Motivated by the need to facilitate Net Generation students' information literacy (IL), or more specifically, to promote student understanding of legitimate, effective use of Web-based resources, this exploratory study investigated how analyzing, writing, posting, and monitoring Wikipedia entries might help students develop critical…

This chapter questions and reflects on the changing role of the foreign language and civilization lecturer as educator, when information literacy skills are situated in an undergraduate curriculum. As such, it does not set itself the task of providing solutions. Instead, it considers all the complications which occur en route to a greater use of…

The nature of the information seeking behaviour of the teachers engaged in General Degree Colleges and Teachers' Training Colleges affiliated to West Bengal State University, India, is critically analysed in the present study. The descriptive analysis is based on well structured, close-ended questionnaires which were distributed among 450…

Introduction: The paper presents original research designed to explore and compare selected aspects of the information seeking behaviour of mathematicians (scientists and students) on the Internet. Method: The data were gathered through a questionnaire distributed at the end of 2011 and in January 2012. Twenty-nine professional mathematicians and…