About

Project Information Literacy (PIL) is ongoing research project, based in the University of Washington's Information School. We are currently collecting data from early adults enrolled in community colleges and public and private colleges and universities in the U.S.

Our goal is to understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and "everyday life" use and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age.

Questions Frequently Asked

At what stage is the study at now?

This spring 2010, we administered a large-scale student survey to college students on U.S. campuses (25 campuses and to over 112,800 students). Our survey collected data, in part, about the research practices and workarounds students use for course-related and everyday life research.

[Return to Top]

There is a lot of research already about information literacy, how is this study different?

Unlike the majority of information literacy research studies, PIL is a study “across” different types of campuses (community colleges, state colleges, and public and private universities) from different geographic areas in the U.S.

[Photo of an Apple]Our goal is to help fill in some of the “missing pieces” of the information literacy puzzle and provide data that helps answer some of the following questions:

  1. How do early adults (in their own words) put their information literacy competencies into practice in learning environments in a digital age, regardless of how they may measure up to standards for being information literate?
  2. With the proliferation of online resources and new technologies, how do early adults recognize the information needs they may have and in turn, how do they locate, evaluate, select and use the information that is needed?
  3. How can teaching the critical and information literacy skills that are needed to enable lifelong learning be more effectively transferred to college students?

[Return to Top]

What practical impact is PIL meant to have?

So far, our research study has had considerable impact and added to understanding of information literacy issues in five key areas:

  1. How information literacy training and coaching is provided to early adults by professors and librarians for conducting course-related research and for "everyday life" research (e.g., health and wellness, finance and commerce, news, and politics or policy).
  2. How college curriculum that requires course-related research and everyday life research is developed and communicated to early adults.
  3. How the design of online resources used by campus libraries and produced by database vendors, enhance or detract from early adults' research experiences.
  4. How (and by how much) different types of institutions impact the information-seeking strategies of their early adults.
  5. How we, as a society, may understand the information problem-solving potential of current U.S. college students who are an important subset of the "adult" cohort, given their unprecedented abundance in enrollment numbers, their professional destinies, and their likelihood to have "grown up digitally".

[Return to Top]

How do we collect our data?

This spring, we will conduct a large-scale student survey across multiple campuses, including community colleges, public colleges and universities, and private universities. We plan to distribute our online sample to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, enrolled on 30+ campuses in the U.S.

Other methods also have included focus groups, content analysis, and interviews for collecting data. Overall, we use social science research methods and employ an information-seeking behavior approach in our research.

[Return to Top]

What is the history of PIL?

In 2007, a small team of faculty and librarians conducted a unique, exploratory research project at Saint Mary's College of California (SMC), led by PIL's Alison Head.

We studied information literacy through the lens of the students' experience to find out how students conceptualized and operationalized the course-related research process.

The initial "exploratory" study results held some surprises:

We found the majority of students (87%) did not  go to Google's search engine first when conducting research as many previous studies have suggested. Students did use the campus library, library web sites, and librarians, and in fact, relied heavily upon these library sources.

From this early work, PIL was founded in 2008 at the University of Washington's iSchool. Alison Head and Dean Emeritus and Professor Michael Eisenberg, based on a mutual passion for information literacy research, became PIL's Co-Directors and Co-Principal Investigators.

Our current research, funded with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, investigates how early adults conduct research in the digital age.

[Return to Top]