ENGE Instructor Toolkit: Student Research Habits

From the essay's heading: "In the academic imagination, depth and attention are the highest of virtues. But in pushing students to apply high-attention strategies to all incoming information, we risk creating a new and dangerous shallowness."

While the essay is very readable, the most salient information regarding students' information use is under the heading "Information Literacy for Mortals."

From the abstract: "This report presents findings about how college students conceptualize the ever-changing online information landscape, and navigate volatile and popular platforms that increasingly employ algorithms to shape and filter content."

While the entire report runs 55 pages, a 3-page executive summary is also available at the link above.

From the abstract: "This paper presents findings about the challenges today’s college freshmen face, and the information-seeking strategies they develop, use, and adapt as they make the transition from high school to college and begin to complete college-level research assignments."

While this study was published in 2012, the information it offers, in combination with the other information included on this guide, helps deepen our understanding of student information use in the first year.

From the abstract: "Project Information Literacy (PIL) has conducted six studies since 2008 to investigate what it is like to be a college student in the digital age. Survey and interview data has been collected from more than 11,000 US college students to investigate how they find, evaluate, and use information for their course work and for addressing issues that arise in their everyday lives. This paper highlights findings from these studies."