College students not information literate?

ETS has done a study of college students information literacy (they call it Information and Communication Technology) skills. The results confirm what many librarians have long feared.

The bad news:

Some of the most surprising preliminary research findings are that only 52% of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site, and only 65% could correctly judge the site’s 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.

Ouch. Take those statistics, put them in your pocket, and pull them out the next time someone asks why we need librarians in the age of Google.

found via Slashdot.

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