Cues and Clues—How Students Identify Online Resources in the Face of "Container Collapse"
Channel: OCLC Research
Date: 2020-03-02

In digital format, a document loses the visual context and cues that print format provides, which students use to help identify a document’s origins and measure its value. In an online environment, it’s difficult to tell whether the container of the document you’re reading is a blog, a book, a journal, or a magazine. We coined the term “container collapse” to describe this phenomenon. Container collapse makes it more difficult for students to identify the resources they retrieve in online search engine results.

What differentiates students who are better at identifying containers from those who struggle? In this webinar, we share findings from an innovative simulation-based study of 175 students from fourth grade to graduate school. Our presentation will focus on the search behaviors and demographic characteristics that impact students’ ability to identify the container of resources that they retrieved from a simulated Google search. We will then discuss the implications for information literacy.

This webinar will be of interest to academic and research librarians, school librarians and media specialists, educators, information scientists, and anyone interested in digital content discovery, information literacy, and online information behavior.