The Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) Online Survey of College Students: Executive Summary

 


Research Background

The Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) is conducting a series of interviews, focus groups, and surveys as part of a comprehensive research program to examine the impact of electronic resources on the scholarly communication process. This includes examining the effect of electronic resources on publishers of scholarly materials, academic libraries, information technology departments at institutions of higher education, college faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The study reported here examines the use and effects of electronic resources on college undergraduate and graduate students.


Research Methods

A 25 minute online survey of college students was conducted in the Spring and Fall 2003 semesters. E-mail invitations were sent to students in the fields of Political Science, International Affairs and Earth/Environmental Sciences at 4 year colleges and universities across the United States. We focused on these particular disciplines because two of EPIC's projects were created for scholars in these disciplines (Columbia International Affairs Online for International Affairs and Earthscape for the Earth/Environmental Sciences. Undergraduate students with a major in Political Science were included in this study because most colleges do not have an undergraduate International Affairs major. The undergraduate students with a major in Political Science would represent the students likely to use CIAO.) The overall response rate to this survey was 8%. Of those who responded, 1233 individuals met our inclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria stipulated respondents be a graduate or undergraduate student at a 4-year liberal arts college, master's college or university, or doctoral/research university, specializing in the field of Political Science, International Affairs or Earth/Environmental Science.


The Sample

The original sample reflected the underlying distribution of students in four-year liberal arts colleges and universities for gender, based on the last year of data available. Weighting factors were used to match the sample to the population for students in 4-year colleges or universities for control of school (public vs. private), and level in school (graduate vs. undergraduate) (1999, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics). We also distributed discipline so that it was represented as 50% Political Science/International Affairs and 50% Earth/Environmental Sciences. The findings from this study indicate general trends among undergraduate and graduate students, and may not necessarily be representative of every individual's experience. Further, this sample is limited to students in the fields of Political Science, International Affairs, and Earth Sciences. The findings may not be generalizable to students in other disciplines.


Study Objectives

The objectives of this study were to:


Key Findings

Electronic resources are heavily used among students with 99% reporting they use electronic resources for their schoolwork. More than half of the respondents use electronic resources for coursework everyday (53.4%). Only 1.5% use electronic resources for coursework once a month or less.

Students learn about school related electronic resources primarily through their library website (31.5%) and through their professors (27.1%). Internet search engines (13.7%) do not play a large role in informing students about academic electronic databases.

Respondents were far more dependent on electronic resources than print resources for their coursework. Respondents said they were most dependent on the World Wide Web, followed by e-mail and library sponsored electronic databases of their own school.

Undergraduate students are more likely than graduate students to use non-library sponsored electronic resources, while graduate students are more likely to use library sponsored electronic and library sponsored print resources.

When going online to do work for a course, students are more likely to use an Internet search engine (46.5%) than to go to a library sponsored electronic resource (21.9%). However, almost 1/3 of the students report that they use both methods equally.

When asked specifically about writing a research/term paper, the source most students turn to first is a library sponsored electronic resource (37.6%) followed closely by students who use an Internet search engine (32.7%) first. This indicates that for general assignments, students are more likely to turn to the Internet, but for in-depth research assignments, students are somewhat more likely to turn to library sponsored electronic resources.

Books and journals are still cited by most students when writing a term paper, however the number of students citing websites does not lag far behind. Books and Journals were each cited by more than three-quarters of respondents as types of resources cited in the bibliography of their last research/term paper (84.8% and 77.8% respectively), while websites were cited by 68.8% of the students.

Students are not the only ones using electronic resources for their courses. Electronic resources also appear to be widely used by professors. The most common ways electronic resources were used include directing students to supplementary materials online, using a course website, placing course materials online for students to retrieve, and using online materials in addition to course textbooks. Many students also report that one or more of their professors use course management programs (such as Blackboard), and almost a third of the students report that at least one of their classes use online materials in place of textbooks.

Respondents were asked to rate the importance of several features of electronic resources, along with their satisfaction with these features in the electronic resources they use. The largest disparities in students' ratings of importance and satisfaction were with the availability of full text, ease of navigation, and search capabilities of databases. In each of these cases respondents rated their satisfaction with the feature significantly lower than the importance of the feature. Features where satisfaction was rated higher than importance were the reputation of the provider of the electronic resource, having text in preserved format, the ability to tell if a source was peer reviewed, and the quality of images/graphics.

Students report that the main advantages of electronic resources are that they allow students to work from a location outside the library, save students time, give students greater access to current information, and allow students to get more information with less effort.

Difficulties students report with electronic resources include search engines that are not as precise or as thorough as students would like them to be, being overloaded with information, and being overwhelmed by the overload of information. Further, 71% agree that electronic resources increase their need to separate out the reliable from unreliable information, with half of the respondents reporting difficulty making these judgments.

A third of respondents admit they tend to go no further than electronic resources when looking for information, and 1/5 of respondents agree that their widespread use of electronic resources is so pervasive that they have not learned how to use the physical library.

Almost 3/4 of students surveyed said they take steps to evaluate the trustworthiness of online information they are using for coursework. Of those who do take steps to evaluate electronic resources, slightly more than half rely on the reputation of the source. One-fifth of respondents cross-check the information found online with another source and 18.6% rely on the reputation of the author when determining the reliability of online information. Almost half of the respondents have not received any formal instruction on how to evaluate electronic resources. Of those who have received instruction, most of them received it from a professor or TA. Of those who had not received any instruction in the evaluation of electronic resources, the vast majority (82%) thought that this instruction would be beneficial to them. Of those who had received instruction in the evaluation of electronic resources, 93% thought it had been useful.

The majority of respondents use the physical library more than once a month (67.7%).

Students are almost as dependent on the physical library to retrieve articles and books (75.8%) as they are on the library's website to do the same (81.5%). However, dependence on the online card catalogue (77%) is much higher than dependence on the physical library for the card catalogue (21%). Undergraduate and graduate students are differentially dependent on the library's services. Graduate students are more dependent on the library's portal to retrieve articles or books from electronic databases, the online card catalogue, and online interlibrary loan while they are dependent on the physical library to retrieve articles or books as well as for interlibrary loan. Undergraduate students are more dependent than graduate students on the physical library as a place to study, for Internet access, for the card catalogue and for access to word processing facilities.

Students report that the use of electronic resources often leads them to settle for information that is available online even though better materials might be available at the library. About 20% of the students say they often or always settle for information that is available remotely rather than going to the physical library to retrieve what they would really like. Another 36% say they do this 'sometimes'.

More than half of the respondents said their preference for print or electronic resources depends on the situation (55.5%). Slightly more than one quarter prefer electronic resources and 18.4% prefer print resources. Print is preferred by some because it is easier to read, it is portable, you can take notes on it, it is easy to evaluate the quality, and it is easy to browse through. Electronic resources are preferred by some because they are easy to access, save time, easy to use, and they make it easy to search for information. Print is preferred for situations where the material is long or dense, and the reader has to fully comprehend the material. Electronic resources are preferred for situations where the reader is obtaining supplementary or background materials, for current events materials, or for looking up information for short papers/homework assignments.


Conclusions