{"id":1555,"date":"2011-08-25T13:33:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-25T17:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=1536"},"modified":"2011-08-25T13:33:36","modified_gmt":"2011-08-25T17:33:36","slug":"what-students-dont-know-mindset-lists-and-digital-natives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2011\/08\/what-students-dont-know-mindset-lists-and-digital-natives.html","title":{"rendered":"What Students Don’t Know: Mindset Lists and Digital Natives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I had a post on this topic<\/a> in mind since I read the piece in Inside Higher Ed<\/em> a few days ago entitled \u201cWhat Students Don\u2019t Know.<\/a>\u201d This sample quote sums up a situation that has increasingly become the focus of my teaching and my classes:<\/p>\n

The most alarming finding in the ERIAL studies was perhaps the most predictable: when it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are downright lousy\u2026The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources\u2026<\/p>\n

Duke and Asher said they were surprised by \u201cthe extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.\u201d Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies\u2026In other words: Today\u2019s college students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"This is something that bears repeating and deserves to get a lot more attention among educators than it currently does.<\/p>\n

In most of my courses that I teach, I have begun to take time to explain what Wikipedia is and how it works, why the top hits in a Google search may not be reliable sources of information, and how to tailor a search so as to produce better results. In one of my classes, identifying reliable information is the central focus, and the final exam involves students being given a question they have never seen before, access to a computer with internet capability, and their finding reliable information to answer the question in the two hour exam time.<\/p>\n

Today, when someone needs information, they pull out a device and look it up. And so having information memorized is less crucial \u2013 although having some facts is essential to being able to identify reliable sources. But the key skill students need is to be able to tell which of the search results is likely to provide reliable information.<\/p>\n

On a related note, another article in Inside Higher Ed<\/em> illustrates that technological and generational change creating a gap between students and professors is nothing new. Mindset lists have been appearing for many years now, illustrating the things which students either take for granted or have never heard of that sets them apart from their professors. A list of what the class of 1915 thinks would include the following<\/a>:<\/p>\n