Education Commons^™

Separating Wheat From Chaff: Helping First-Year Students Become Information Savvy, Trudi E. Jacobson, Beth Mark

Library Staff Presentations & Publications

Many traditional first-year students arrive on college and university campuses with a great deal of experience in searching the Internet. In fact, they can find prodigious amounts of information with relative ease—as evidenced by the lists of Web sites used to document many of their research papers. Most of these students, however, lack the critical-thinking skills and database-searching proficiency necessary for them to fine-tune their information searches. They need to know how to focus their topics, where (in addition to the Internet) to search, and how to evaluate and use the information they retrieve—skills commonly encompassed in the phrase “information …

Teaching Anxious Students Skills For The Electronic Library, Beth Mark, Trudi E. Jacobson

Library Staff Presentations & Publications

Some students immediately feel at home in today's technology-saturated library, but many others have difficulty navigating the myriad of electronic sources in most academic libraries. It is estimated that as many as one-third of the college students in the United States suffer from technophobia and are anxious about using computers. In addition to coping with computer technology, many first-year college students are intimidated by the size and complexity of academic libraries (Mellon 1986). In short, just when students most need to become competent users of information technology, anxieties can cause them to avoid the library altogether (Warmkessel 1992).

Breaking the …