Tiedonhakutaidot testissä – nuorten osaaminen hakukanavan valinnassa, hakulausekkeen muotoilussa ja hakutulosten arvioinnissa
Abstract
Data consisting of 3168 12–22 year old Finnish youths’ technology usage habits and test results concerning information seeking are analysed in this paper. The research objective was to find out Finnish youths’ information literacy skills in locating, searching and evaluating information. Research Unit for the Sociology of Education has developed a test for detecting different forms of ICT usage, recording self-evaluations about ICT skills and particulary finding out the actual ICT skills by means of tasks related to 18 different fields of ICT. In the information retrieval tasks the adolescents had to choose the right search channel, form an appropriate search phrase and finally evaluate the search results. The results indicate that the overall information seeking skills among youths are insufficient. Boys perform better than girls in tasks which require locating information resources, girls in their turn in evaluating search results. Both genders are mainly unable to produce correct and comprehensive search closures. The analysis focuses especially on those technology usage targets which are associated with both skilled and poor information literacy. Those who perform well in information seeking tasks are more active users of digital technology than the others, use more actively new media services and use technology as a tool for making their own content or for searching information and following current events online.
