More than one in four students gathering information from the internet forget the knowledge gleaned afterwards, according to a pilot study to be published in the International Journal of Education Economics and Development. The study hoped to investigate just how well students retain knowledge gleaned from the internet and revealed that almost 73% of participants had low to moderate knowledge retention.
Zakaria Saleh of Yarmouk University, in Irbid, Jordan, explains how students are increasingly turning to the internet, and specifically the World Wide Web to help them gather information for schoolwork and related tasks. However, there are concerns among educators that there is no indication as to whether or not students understand or think critically about the information they find. The issue of knowledge retention is also yet to be fully addressed by educational researchers, he adds.
The so-called “digital natives”, youngsters who have grown up in a world in which information technology and access to the Internet are almost ubiquitous, are the first generation to have used computers in learning throughout their lives. As such, educational policy has focused on employing these tools increasingly in recent years. “The internet offers students with the possibility to acquire knowledge without time and space constraints,” says Saleh, “Nevertheless, the added value of the internet should be viewed in the learning and knowledge retention, and not just in the instrument used to vehicle new contents and new concepts.”
Saleh has surveyed a limited number of undergraduate and graduate students, 153, to test various hypotheses pertaining to knowledge retention, student attitudes to the internet and how educators approach the use of information technology. The computer skills of most of the participants (131) were generally above population averages and more than half indicated that they have average or better than average internet skills (88 participants). The majority use the internet as an information source for assignments.
The results confirmed earlier studies regarding the ease of use of the internet as an information source. However, Saleh was more concerned with the way in which internet use affects knowledge retention among students. He found that overall use was high, at more than 1 in 10 of participants, but that for almost three-quarters of the students knowledge retention of information obtained via the internet was low to moderate. Graduate students were better at retaining such information than undergraduates, although graduate students tend to be more dedicated to learning and are often selected as being among the brighter students on a course.
The findings should nevertheless, “flag an alert for educators when they rely on the internet for their students’ knowledge acquisition and retention,” Saleh says. He adds that there is now an, urgent needed to conduct further research to measure the effectiveness of using the internet as a source of information in the learning process.
Zakaria I. Saleh (2011). A framework to evaluate the likelihood of knowledge retention when college students obtain information from the internet Int. J. Education Economics and Development, 2 (4), 363-379