Are College Students Techno Idiots?

ict_geek writes "Are college students techno idiots? Despite the inflammatory headline, Inside Higher Ed asks an interesting question. The article refers to a recent study by ETS, which analyzed results from 6,300 students who took its ICT Literacy Assessment. The findings show that students don't know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can't narrow down an overly broad search, and can't tailor a message to a particular audience. Yikes. According to the article: 'when asked to select a research statement for a class assignment, only 44 percent identified a statement that captured the assignment's demands. And when asked to evaluate several Web sites, 52 percent correctly assessed the objectivity of the sites, 65 percent correctly judged for authority, and 72 percent for timeliness. Overall, 49 percent correctly identified the site that satisfied all three criteria.'" If they are, they're not the only ones.

Clearly this is posted by ...

Clearly this is posted by one of the studies subjects :-)

Re:

Clearly this is posted by one of the studies subjects :-)

I wonder if they all had to sit through those Library "orientation" classes

Personally, I have serious doubts about anyone's ability to teach a "techno idiot" the ability to judge the authoritativenes

Re:Clearly this is posted by ...

I would like to think that I am not a techno idiot - I am working on my Ph.D. in computer engineering so I have to read and review a lot of technical papers. However, I am not sure how I (or anyone else) would teach someone how to judge web pages in an entire semester, let alone a single class period.

I have seen a couple of lists on how to judge a site. The one [cornell.edu] from Cornell has points like:

• Is the author different than the webmaster?
• What URL/domain is used?
• Is it an information page or an advertisesment?
• Modified date/is it current?
• Are the links correct and match the page?

Sure, these are nice - but they hardly apply everywhere. There are a lot of things in the sciences that haven't changed, so a date of 1998 hardly impacts the validity of the page. There are also a lot of old pages with broken links. Still doesn't impact their information. This happens quite a bit when you find a white paper and an organization decided to redesign their entire site. You can still find the paper through Google, but the old URL is useless.

Same problem with requiring contact information for the author. A lot of government agencies only list the webmaster as a contact in the page footer. Does that mean the page is invalid? No. It means that government sources don't have specific authors. A USDA report is still a USDA report even if it is 5 years old, doesn't list an author and has broken links. How do we teach when the rules don't matter?

I think the problem is people are trying to come up with rules to apply, and there are a lot of exceptions. Remember Dihydrogen Monoxide? [dhmo.org] it was a complete joke - but the site "passed" the criteria. So it must be a valid source. Right? If people were trained to think on their own, instead of being taught how to apply rules, I think we would be better off.

Re:

I agree. Since I couldn't reach either of the ets.org links, I can't see any of their sample questions, if those were even posted. Without that, how do we know that the people giving the tests can even decide the validity of a web page?

I hate to brin

ID10T5

This goes well with my theory that over 50% of human beings are idiots.

Re:ID10T5

I think you're being generous.

My personal longstanding theory is that the total global I.Q. is a constant. It's just split up among an exponentially growing population.

Every seven seconds or so I feel a brain cell trying to die.

Re:ID10T5

exactly; does this study control for people who are idiots?

It's not college students, it's people

*Most* people are terrible at critical reading. Just terrible.

For that matter, most people don't really like to read at all.

Re:It's not college students, it's people

Parent.modpoints++;
Most people I know here (Suburban NY) refuse to read any work aside from 'executive' summaries & Cliff notes. I write techincal papers for a living; I would say a good 90% read the first page (the afore mentioned 'executive' summary) and proceed to fire off questions about what is covered in the other 99% of the document. We intentionally write in 'lay man''s' terms to avoid talking over many people, yet they refuse to read anything more than the first 1 - 2 pages. We have purposfully tested this idea with writing the first five pages in english, then filing in the rest with either technobable from a Markov Generator or pages from lipsum. Although this was an unimportant document, only one person actually asked what the rest of the document ment. Ouch. It's a good thing that I don't have to stay if layed off by a decent program (since that could easily generate a two page summary for these idiots).

Re:It's not college students, it's people

Parent.modpoints++; Most people I know here (Suburban NY) refuse to read any work aside from 'executive' summaries & Cliff notes. I write techincal papers for a living; I would say a good 90% read the first page (the afore mentioned 'executive' summary) and proceed to fire off questions about what is covered in the other 99% of the document. We intentionally write in 'lay man''s' terms to avoid talking over many people, yet they refuse to read anything more than the first 1 - 2 pages. We have purposfully tested this idea with writing the first five pages in english, then filing in the rest with either technobable from a Markov Generator or pages from lipsum. Although this was an unimportant document, only one person actually asked what the rest of the document ment. Ouch. It's a good thing that I don't have to stay if layed off by a decent program (since that could easily generate a two page summary for these idiots).

This comment is too long. Can someone give me an executive summary?

I agree

Most people are great at critical reading, like me.

Re:It's not college students, it's people

*Most* people are terrible at critical reading.

I totally agree. For instance, most /. comments on this story fail to critique the validity of the test's questions or whether there was any bias in the study's selection of test-takers.

Re:It's not college students, it's people

Mod parent up! When a conclusion of a study is something we want to believe, in this case, "Most college students are idiots with computers and information", and this reinforces something we believe about ourselves, "I am smarter than these people", we don't question the methodology as we should. Contrast that to a study which shows something you don't want to believe, the first thing that happens, you question the methodology. Of course, my idea here has not been proven, it's just something I'm guessing.

Mod parent up!

From the .pdf :

When constructing a presentation slide designed to persuade. . .
-80% included irrelevant points with relevant points
-Just 12% used only points directly related to the argument
-8% used entirely irrelevant points

Well DUH!!!

When you "persuade" someone, "irrelevant points" are useful if they can be used to emotionally "persuade" someone.

You see this all the time in political discussions.

The problems with "testing" people is that the people who write the tests have their own biases and opinions about what is "better" or "bad". And since they write the tests, their opinions are naturally considered to be more "correct" than the people they're testing.

Re:Mod parent up!

I'm uncomfortable with this argument by authority. People who are knowledgeable about a subject have their own biases, and sometimes they show pretty clearly.

For example, the report gives points to people who point out that an EDU or GOV site is inherently less biased than a .COM site. This is wistful thinking on the part of people who are marinated in the academic environment.

Actually, it's fairly well known that academics have a left-wing bias. I spent a very interesting year working in an academic environment, and can confirm this to be true through direct observation. Government, of course, has a bias in favour of the programs it's referencing. If I wanted to find an impartial take on the Social InSecurity programme, for example, I don't think SSA.GOV would be the right place to start.

Finally, their mostly content-free slide presentation does not inspire confidence, at least in me. And the Flash "Demo" doesn't allow me to try it out; it just demonstrates it in action. Boring, and the use of audio makes it over-long and far more tedious than it would have otherwise been. Thes are not the information management and presentation skills I expect from a world-class organization - especially since far less complex and easier to develop systems would have worked better.

D

Where do you stop?

The link says the test's reliability is .88. At least they give a definition: that's the correlation between results on multiple administrations of the test. So a critical reader will ask what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that has to do with

So...

What's this article about ?

Re:So...

'Those goddamn kids are so stupid today yadda yadda yadda...'

We were all so much smarter at their age, because that's how we care to remember things.

Re:So...

What's this article about ?

It seems to me that it's about purple haddocks that live in houses made of straw. I could be wrong though ...

It's not tech that they are missing...

It's critical thinking skills.

This is nothing new. Decades of teaching to standardized tests and ignoring the thought process in favor of fact regurgitation has led to this.

Mod parent up

Absolutely. The skills described have as much to do with technology as they do to music appreciation. These results are all about critical thinking deficiencies. Or, put another way, proving once again how many people are sheep/lemmings/cattle looking t

Re:

Don't be too quick to knock all standardized tests. I don't know about the end-of-grade tests in public schools, but one look at the SAT and it's fairly plain that it's been designed to evaluate critical thinking ability.

Re:

I'm not knocking the tests themselves (though some do deserve it), I'm knocking teaching to the test. My 7th through 10th grade English Lit classes were just vocabulary classes, a complete waste of my time. One year our final exam was a friggin' crosswor

Virginia SOL

Yes, that's really what they call the benchmark tests, though it stands for "Standards Of Learning". They are terrific at determining how much "trivia" (for lack of a better term) can be memorized by children, and regurgitated on a test. It's gotten so bad that SOL preparation takes up a substantial portion of the learning year. I have a colleague who moved here from NY around the middle of last year, and his kids nearly flunked several of their subjects. The reason was SOL based teaching - much of it is Virginia-history specific, apparently, and having spent 4-6 years in New York schools (which, apparently, are not part of the Great State of Virginia) did not know the minutiae taught here in order to pass the standard learning tests. This year they're doing great, having had the opportunity to memorize the appropriate facts from day one. This is not the kind of learning that will benefit these kids when they enter the real world.

Re:It's not tech that they are missing...

Careful, though, because there are school systems who have dismissed "regurgitation" like memorizing multiplication tables in favor of teaching "process". This results in people who can give you a general outline of problem-solving processes but can't solve problems. They neither have practice in solving problems, nor can they multiply 6x30 without a calculator.

So for young kids, I don't think it's either teaching them "facts" nor is it teaching them "process", but instead in might be something like "forcing them to practice". Given enough practice, kids will learn to memorize important information, throw away useless trivia and info they can look up, and discover their own best processes.

Re:

So for young kids, I don't think it's either teaching them "facts" nor is it teaching them "process", but instead in might be something like "forcing them to practice".

Like any good practical instruction, it's theory + implementation. The student must mas

Wow

The findings link looks like an html document, but it redirects to a PDF file. Neat trick.

No wonder some people are confused over this interweb business ...

Yes

Real conversation

Me: What program did you use to download all that pr0n?

Fellow Student: Windows 98

Me: Could you be a little more specific?

Student: Oh, Windows 98 SE

This stuff happens to me seemingly everyday. Don't even get me started on the argument I had with a CIS student over whether USB 2.0 is better than USB 1.1

Re:

This stuff happens to me seemingly everyday. Don't even get me started on the argument I had with a CIS student over whether USB 2.0 is better than USB 1.1

Which was better?

Re:Yes

Firewire

Re:

Are you sure? I've heard that this 1394 thing is better.

Re:

It doesn't compare to i.Link, though. I hear that beats both of those.

Re:

USB 1.1 obviously, since it's "full speed" and usb 2.0 is "hi speed". USB 2.0 may be hi speed so its better than USB 1.0, but full speed is the best because you can't go any faster than full speed.

Re:

so what was his point?

Yes.

Are College Students Techno Idiots?

If, by "college students," we mean "most college students," just like we mean "most people" when we ask, "are people techno idiots?"

Honestly, answers to a question like that, in this venue, are going to be so distorted by the abnormal slashdot nerd density as to be meaningless when talking about a wider demographic. My personal experience with most college students is that they are just as much in the "it's just magic, and it works" (as well as the "my computer is so slow! it won't even run the new free stuff I download any more!") camp as the average non-college-student person.

The "technical" stuff with which they're comfortable (as in, feel mastery thereof) are the dedicated-purpose devices that don't really let you hose them up (phones, cameras, simple MP3 players, etc). But they don't know how or why any of it works any more than they know how or why their car, their democracy, their adrenal glands, or the free WiFi at Panera works. And I'm not just talking about the liberal arts majors.

Re:Yes.

Frankly, I'm astonished that it broke 50%. I think we should be celebrating... no I'm not kidding. If this study is correct, it has significantly RAISED my expectations.

I write distance learning software

And I've felt guilty about the fact that some people who should not be taking distance learning are signing up for courses. I've also been irritated by the repeat calls to the helpdesk on topics that it is reasonable to expect a "distance learner" to know how to do.

As a result we developed an information literacy class that is a required component for taking a Distance Learning class, and it is of course contained within our (home grown) Distance Learning platform. If you have not passed IL, you can't get to any of your other classes.

Because we've got a home grown app, we were able to put in alot of specific things (how to submit an assignment, how to send an email to a specific address, how to upload a file, how to download a file and then find it again). It's the way of things. You can't blame the users if they are incompetent. You either have to ensure they are competent, or block them from using the system, and give them an opportunity to learn and demonstrate their competancy

Not a surprise unfortunately...

The findings show that students don't know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can't narrow down an overly broad search, and can't tailor a message to a particular audience.

1. Isn't everything on see on the Internet true?

2. Google figures out everything you need to know anyway.

3. U mean thy use txt speech insted of reg typng on tsts?

---

In all seriousness, I'm not surprised by anything these days. I work for a two year college and there are programs that offer money to "college ready" high school students (no remedial work necessary) and there was a HS principal (this week) that when told about the program said, "none of our students would qualify, don't even bother to bring it up."

Why should these studies even worry about topics like this when students aren't even placing into 100/1000 level courses when they "graduate" high school?

Programming students might be the worse...

I been going to school part-time for the last five years to learn programming. (This is my second tour through college as I got my General Education associate degree in 1994.) A lot of programming students will learn only what the instructors put in front

Digital generation

That's about right. I always see these news stories about the digital generation and generation myspace, etc, etc. They'll show some kid downloading music, chatting on AIM, going on myspace, and playing some game in flash on a website. The parents go on how great he can multitask and how great he is on the computer, blah, blah, blah.

The truth is, many kids just find a few things they really like and latch onto them. They don't really understand any sort of computing fundamentals. They understand how to go on AIM and myspace all day. When faced with a computer intensive task that relies on critical thinking and not just keystroke habits, they fall flat on their face.

A Switch

Reminds me of hooking up a five port switch once for this lady. She points at it and says, "is that the Internet?"

remember

to users the UI is the system.
or more broadly, what they can see is the system.
For her intentions, the most probabaly correct answer is yes.
Technically correct? no. Is it correct for practical purposes? yes.

At least she grasped it was something outside her

Breakdown by Major

I'm curious if majors had a significant correlation. At first I'd expect electrical/computer engineering/science majors to fair well. However when you factor in that this is ofter more of a test of research skills and critical thinking, than I can see th

Sample Questions?

I tried to view the sample questions on their site, but I couldn't...Despite the fact that I have Flash 9, it kept trying to redirect me to "get flash". I'll have to see at least a few of the examples before I regard this study as authoritative.

A study don

This is not suprising in the least

I went to a school that ranks in the top five on Wired's Most Wired Campuses list. I work for a company that builds advanced computer systems with capabilities far beyond the average joe's imagination. Since my youngest days I have been surrounded by compu

Revenge of the Liberal Arts Majors

I was an English major and made my way into IT through the workplace. I constantly encounter situations where I use my college skills to write and speak clearly. In fact, I'm struck by how well those skills have aged at this point in my career versus the skills of IT/CS majors my age (I'm 40).

So, for Computer Science/IT/MIS majors, I'd recommend the following -

• Take at least one class a year outside of your field that requires writing assignments. It can be in Literature, History, Economics,Psychology - whatever interests you - but learning about diverse subjects and being able to write in response keeps your writing skills honed and your abstract reasoning skills sharp. Also, learning outside of your major may help apply your technical skills to real life domains.
• Take a Public Speaking class. Some degree programs require it, but anyone who graduates from a university should be able to give a coherent oral presentation. Most Public Speaking classes aren't just about the mechanics of speaking (vocal projection, enunciation, body language and eye contact) but also how to organize your thoughts and shape a presentation for a given audience and time frame. People won't see the value in your ideas if they don't understand what you're talking about.

In my opinion

Everyone who listens to techno is an idiot.

Oh wait, you meant the OTHER techno

We're too visual

I'll point us back to a couple of /. posts.

First, Nature found that people judge websites in a few milliseconds:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 7/0342224 [slashdot.org]

Then Harvard and Cal find that phishing works because people judge too much on the visual presentation:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/30/1556226.shtml [slashdot.org]

Now we see that people are poor judges of content. Quite close to A + B = C.

Not much better than middle schoolers, actually...

I taught technology at a middle school for a year, unfortunately... I remember spending a few days trying to teach them how to really use a search engine. The general idea was that you should:

1. Write a sentence or paragraph that states the question you are trying to answer
2. Go through and underline key words
3. Plug those words into a search engine

We also went over how search engines work, and I taught them to think of words that would appear on a page that held the answer they were looking for. For instance, if the question is, "How much does the moon weigh?" then you might search for the word "tons" -- even though it's not in the actual question, it would certainly be in the answer.

I thought they had it, so I made up a list of questions and let them loose on Google. And what did they do, after all that? They typed the entire question, verbatim, into the search engine box.

Most of them were also unable to distinguish ads from actual content; they would click on them indiscriminately. The fake error box ads got them every time. And it wasn't for lack of experience; some of them spent just as much time on the Internet as I did, but still they had no mental filters.

On the other hand, they were extremely good at finding all kinds of inappropriate content. We used to have races - they would look at as many dirty-joke-skateboarding-crash-video-rap-artist-bi o-flash-game-and-other-Internet-crapware sites as they could, and I would monitor the router logs and block sites as fast as I could manage. It kept me pretty busy, but by the end of the year I had a great blacklist.

I would expect this kind of competency from middle schoolers, but by college you should know better. If you can write an English paper, you should be able to think critically enough about a topic to Google it effectively.

You can lead a horse to water...

Your comment got me thinking about something. I, too -- as well as most others here on Slashdot, I'd expect -- just "figured out" the internet, and most things about computers and technology in general.

However, I think that we had some motivation to. At least I did -- I was curious about the internet, and what information (insert porn joke here) I could find on it. So I figured out how to use it.

I suspect that a lot of people out there, have never really had any burning desire to use the internet to accomplish some task that wasn't trivial. Thus, they've never bothered to figure it out. I doubt they're completely incompetent, if they wanted to do it; they just don't care.

It reminds me of a (much) younger brother of mine, who was never much into computers. At about the same age that I started getting interested in technology, he found other hobbies. He knew where the power switch was on his iMac, but that was about it. When he wanted to look something up on the Internet, he'd usually just ask or call me, and I'd research it and send him back some results. When I started working and moved further away, it wasn't practical to do this anymore. The last time I went back and spent some time with him, he was significantly better at doing internet research. Not only that, but he had figured out how to install software, access technical forums and ask the right questions when it didn't work, and generally troubleshoot. He'd even bought and installed a new hard drive and RAM, and set up a WLAN and shared printer (by finding and following the right HOWTO-type articles). While it might seem trivial to the Slashdot crowd, this isn't bad for a casual computer user.

This was somebody who I had basically written off as so incompetent at anything electronic or mechanical, that he'd be a hazard to himself. (And in truth, later I found out that he had hosed his system more than once in the learning process.) But when there wasn't someone there to ask questions of, or do research for him, he had a reason to figure it out. And he did.

Sometimes you have to let people fail and learn on their own, if they're ever going to succeed at all.