Exploring Students' Perceptions of the Web as an Information Source

Abstract

This article explores undergraduate students' perceptions of the accuracy, relevance, and currency of information presented on the World Wide Web (Web). In this study, we asked our subjects to rank various information sources in terms of perceived accuracy, relevance, and currency. The information sources studied include the Web, business magazines, scholarly journals, general-interest magazines, and books. Our findings indicate that undergraduate students do not perceive the Web to be any less accurate as an information source than other common information sources. In fact, we find that our subjects perceive the Web to be more accurate than several other information sources. Our subjects ranked business magazines as the source of the most relevant information. Our subjects considered newspapers and the Web as being equal in terms of currency. We discuss implications of these findings including the need to educate Web users on the differences in the Web vis-a-vis other information sources.