Study Reveals: 94% Students Turn to Google for Research!

Google know everything! At least this is accepted as a fact by teenagers across the US because 94% of teenagers turn to Google for research in modern day’s digital world. Google is teenagers’ primary research tool as per a research titled: “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World” by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. 

Encyclopedia sites like Wikipedia, news sites or even online libraries or research databases and social media networks: all fall short in comparison with Google’s popularity. This data has been gathered by Pew using a mix of teacher focus groups as well as student focus groups along with online surveys conducted among teachers. As per the study, “Ultimately, some teachers say, for students today, “research = Googling.” Specifically asked how their students would define the term “research,” most teachers felt that students would define the process as independently gathering information by "looking it up" or "Googling.” And when asked how middle and high school students today “do research,” the first response in every focus group, teachers and students, was “Google.”

While students are gaga about Google, teachers disagree and don’t even trust the results provided by the search engine to be academically accurate. Only 5% of the teachers think the results to be ‘almost all accurate’ while the rest find some of the results to be accurate. 99% of the teachers are of the view that “search engines have conditioned students to expect to be able to find information quickly and easily.” 

Teachers are of the view that they need to encourage students to use different tools while conducting research apart from Google. 57% teachers “spend class time helping students improve search terms and queries, yet just [35 percent] devote class time to helping students understand how search engines work and how search results are actually generated and ranked.” In fact teachers are now busy creating assignments which will not make it possible for the students to rely on search engines.

The study concludes with the view that students need to put in time and rely on multiple sources to complete their research. Simply relying on Google leads to a big question on the accuracy and quality of information.