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Commentary: What Students Don’t Know

Here’s the must read “Inside Higher Ed” article of the week.

What Students Don’t Know

A two-year anthropological study of student research habits shows that students are in dire need of help from librarians, but are loath to ask for it. “The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project — a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago and Springfield campuses — was a meta-exercise for the librarians in practicing the sort of deep research they champion. Instead of relying on surveys, the libraries enlisted two anthropologists, along with their own staff members, to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation, among other methods.”

Pull Quotes:

““I don’t think I would see them [librarians] and say, ‘Well, this is my research, how can I do this and that?’ ” one senior psychology major told the researchers. “I don’t see them that way. I see them more like, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’”

“This is one of the sobering truths these librarians, representing a group of Illinois universities, have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries: students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. The idea of a librarian as an academic expert who is available to talk about assignments and hold their hands through the research process is, in fact, foreign to most students. Those who even have the word “librarian” in their vocabularies often think library staff are only good for pointing to different sections of the stacks.”

“One thing the librarians now know is that their students’ study habits are worse than they thought. … “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process,” according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited “a lack of understanding of search logic” that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.”

“Today’s college students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar. ”

This seems to be a potential condemnation of the roles of librarians and professor in creating an information and research literate population for the next era.

Off the top of head, in my opinion, this research implies:

1. Academic librarians need to invest more heavily in marketing and selling their services even though these are often a dirty words in academia. The responsibility for effective communication is on the communicator not the listener so blaming students for this failure is a bad tactic. If blaming students has become part of the culture you’ve got a bigger issue.

2. Academic libraries need to invest in more scalable solutions for training, orientation, and information literacy engagement. Too many higher ed institutions invest too heavily in classroom, group training at the begging of the school year and in first year. They usually tough / hit a small minority of students which is not enough. E-learning might be the opportunity here – especially if it becomes a required course or credit.

3. Academic library leaders need to ensure that their staffing models tilt towards student and external engagement staff versus a backroom (technology, management and metadata) orientation. More liaison staff and training developers might be called for.

4. Academic libraries need to touch the students more. How often are they communicating effectively with students? Are the mining e-mail, direct mail, web, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to their full potential as vehicle to keep advanced library services front of mind?

5. Academic libraries need to build strategies that build on the students’ strengths rather than trying to repair them. Dismissing the ‘digital natives’ theory as unhelpful is silly. Knowing that students have a facility with some technologies and Google search and building on that skill rather than trying to replace it with an alternative is a wiser strategy.

6. Academic library marketing strategies need to get clearer. Too many words will not break through the busy and stressed student life milieu. Take a few hints from the world of advertising and get their attention first. Most institutions teach that somewhere!

7. This research reinforces the strong role that professors play in student life. Academic libraries should have clearly defined strategies and tactics for engaging and educating administration and faculty about the role libraries and librarians play in improving education. They must include significant strategies for the role of libraries in hybrid and stand-alone e-learning

If this battle isn’t won, then university and college grads are going to be at risk of making their decisions based on simple Google searches manipulated by commercial interests. That scares me.

There are a ton of great initiatives out there in academic libraries. The game is not lost but everyone need to move to the next plateau. We need to get these to diffuse throughout the academic sphere.

Stephen

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Posted on: August 22, 2011, 12:51 pm Category: Uncategorized

2 Responses

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  1. ghyslain said

    Whoa. I think the article jumped a few spaces here on the game board of education meeting reality. How many times have we heard librarians complain that students want librarians to do the work for them, to write the reports for them, to think for them? Librarians I’ve encountered are very much into “show them how to use the tools then let ’em loose” kind of librarianship which nothing more than showing them where in the stacks the information is found with some help in using search startegies in automated and non-automated tools. Subject specialization translates into specialized knowledge of the tools at hand and how to use them. The problem is with us librarians fulfilling our self imposed limitations, not with students thinking we are there to show them where the toilet is.

  2. Ghyslaine:
    I get your point but there is a vast gulf between having an opinion about students based on the ones we’re seeing face to face and knowing how the whole population is behaving. There is a similar issue in public libraries where the people seen face to face are quite different than the whole population in the community AND the ones who use the library mostly virtually. Generally the virtual users are better educated, higher income, more male, better computer skills and younger and there are likely more of them, perhaps the majority of usage. Some librariand see the entire population od users as suffering fomr the limitations of in-person experiences. If you base your strategies on anecdotal information and opinions solely gained by face to face experiences then you run the risk of ignoring whole populations of users. That’s why this study is important and interesting, it studied the whole population of potential student users and not just those who came into the library or used the website or databases. Both pieces of data are useful and valid to consider but we can’t have just a strategy to serve them when they encounter roadbloacks, or arrive in the library with a question or ask. I believe that we need something more scalable or we’ll fail.
    Stephen