The questions were written to be applicable to students' lives; for example, one question reads, "You are about to get a tattoo, but a friend warned you that some places spread infections like HIV and hepatitis. Use the Internet to find out if this is true."
"Students had the most trouble with the AA question and the HIV test question. It seemed to be the local element that tripped them up," says Derek Hansen, a doctoral student at the U-M School of Information and lead author of the study. "The easiest question was on diabetes and diet, most likely because there is so much information on the Web about that topic."
Searches were deemed successful, partially successful or unsuccessful. Successful answers were complete, correct and useful. For example, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in another state was not useful. Partially successful answers either addressed only part of the question or were correct but not useful.
Students completed a total of 68 searches, averaging 5 minutes, 41 seconds. In 60 of those searches, students started by using a search engine. Search phrases were almost always fewer than four words, and the two most common searches used five times each were simply "diabetes" and "Paxil."
"The students tended to use extremely general search terms," Hansen says. "For example, when the question asked if fatigue could be caused by Paxil, many of the students just typed 'Paxil,' resulting in a large number of hits that contained no information about fatigue."
Another roadblock was misspelled words. Despite the written questions being posted next to the computer, 30 of the 132 search phrases entered contained at least o
'"/>
Contact: Nicole Fawcett
nfawcett@umich.edu
734-764-2220
University of Michigan Health System
17-Oct-2003