This report presents data from a survey of 1,140 full time students at four year colleges in the United States about how they go about doing research for writing term papers and other purposes. The study gives extensive data on the extent to which students rely on general internet searches, on-line academic library resources, print resources and other means to find the research information that they need. The 120-page study also presents detailed information on how students evaluate their own skill in organizing and composing a research paper, including data on how they feel about their capabilities in each of the following areas: organizing a term paper, researching the paper, writing the paper, spelling and grammar skills, and citation skills – data on self-evaluation is presented for each of these characteristics.
The study gives its readers hard data about pressing instruction-related issues such as: how often are students relying on library resources vs. those available on the general internet? What role does Wikipedia and other wikis play in student research? How important are print collections vs. digital collections and non-library internet resources? How do students evaluate their own level of skill in organizing a paper? In researching a paper? Who needs help but perhaps lags in recognition?
Data in the report is broken out by more than 17 variables including but not limited to year of class standing, age, gender, sexual orientation, academic major or area of concentration, public/private college status, student family income level, region of origin, race/ethnicity, college grades, SAT/ACT scores and other variables.
Just a few of this pathbreaking report’s may findings are that:
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Students who grew up outside of the United States were significantly more likely than students who grew up in the United States to use extensively Wikipedia or other wikis In their research.
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Freshmen were much more likely than seniors to rely on general internet resources rather than on online or print resources maintained by the academic library.
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Males students were much more likely than female ones to feel that they needed more help with spelling and grammar.
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Students majoring in psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, or other social science (73.59%) and philosophy, history, English, classics, education or languages (70.94%) were most likely to have ever written a 10+ page paper during their college tenure, while students majoring in fine or performing arts (50.63%) and engineering, mathematics, or computer science (52.90%) were least likely.