ETS ICT test tells others what we have long known
November 16, 2006 information fluency No CommentsData generated by ETS from its ICT Literacy Assessment (Information Communication Technology) “gathered from over 6,300 students found at 63 universities, colleges, community colleges, and high schools has yielded unsurprising results.” Yesterday's Inside Higher Education reports on an ETS study that “shows that that only 52% of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site, and only 65% could correctly judge the sites authoritativeness. In a Web search task, only 40% entered multiple search terms to narrow the results. And when selecting a research statement for a class assignment, only 44% identified a statement that captured the demands of the assignment.” Inside Higher Education quotes ETS's Irvin Katz who said, “These abilities need to be learned…Students just don't pick them up on their own.”
How true! It has long amazed me that college and university faculty seem to expect students to enter knowing why and how to cite others' work, which information sources serve various needs, how to select a database appropriate to a given need, and how to evaluate information sources critically. Yet they don't assume that students enter knowing how to use various types of lab equipment or SPSS. They teach these things to their students. But many dont take any effort to introduce students to relevant information sources nor to explain how to use them effectively. Why is there this dichotomy?
Is it that faculty forget how they learned these things, many perhaps not until graduate school? Is it that they assume students have routinely been using these resources throughout their schooling?
Whatever the reason, students get shortchanged when faculty don't take measures to teach their students these things. Perhaps the ETS ICT test results provide the sort of evidence faculty need to appreciate a problem that librarians have long known about and tried to solve. And perhaps they will also see the advantages to work with librarians, their natural allies, to solve it.
