What Do First-Year Students Know about Information Research? And What Can We Teach Them?

First-year students have long been a primary focus of academic librarians’ research and assessment efforts. From these studies, and even more particularly from the unempirically based library literature, there emerges a picture of first-year students. These first-year students are extreme examples of their collegiate peers: “lazy, procrastinating, plagiarizing patrons of the glut of information that has come to be known as the Internet” (Thompson 2003). • They rely heavily upon the Internet for meeting their information needs, sometimes even changing their research topics to match the information available electronically (Bartsch and Tydlacka 2003; Jones 2002; Laskowski 2002; Lombardo and Miree 2003; Macdonald and Dunkelberger 2000; Pask and Snow 1995; Seamans 2002; Thompson 2003). • They ignore library information resources and services (Bao 2002; Jones 2002; Thompson 2003; San Jose Mercury News 2003; Seamans 2002). • They act on the “principle of least effort” in researching (Associated Press 2004; Bates 2003; Debrowski 2001; Young and Von Seggern 2001). They often seek to get the highest grade with the least expenditure of time and effort (Burton and Chadwick 2000; Harley, Dreger, and Knobloch 2001; Valentine 2001), and they sometimes unthinkingly use the first few information sources they find (Hammond 1999; Tenopir et al. 2003). • They use unsophisticated searching techniques, which unbeknownst to them are inadequate for finding the needed information (Associated Press 2004; Bates 2003; Cockrell and Jayne 2002; Debrowski 2001; Dyckman 1995; Grimes and Boening 2001; Kunkel, Weaver, and Cook 1996; Nowicki 2003; Pask and Snow 1995; Seiden, Szymborski and Norelli 1997; Spink and Gunar 2001; Sutcliffe, Ennis, and Watkinson 2000; Tenopir et al. 2003; Thaxton, Faccioli, and Mosby 2004; Valentine 2001). • They accept uncritically information sources from the Web, largely because they are unaware either of the existence of misinformation on the Web or of criteria for evaluating Web resources (Bodi 2002; Burton and Chadwick 2000; Grimes and Boening 2001; Harley, Dreger, and Knobloch 2001; Herring 2001; Jones and Barajas 2004; Kunkel, Weaver, and Cook 1996; Lorenzen 2001; Pask and Snow 1995; Stepp 2002; Weiler 2001). What Do First-Year Students Know about Information Research? And What Can We Teach Them?