Monday, February 23, 2009

More Evidence Supports the Need for Caution

Results of research being conducted that the BC Institute of Technology cast serious doubt on many of the Net Generation claims.

We surveyed a random sample of over 400 students to determine the extent to which the students in the net generation category exhibited the characteristics that have been attributed to this generation by people like Don Taspscott, Marc Prensky, and Neil Howe & William Strauss, and others. These characteristics include:
  1. Digitally literate
  2. Preference for structure and experiential learning
  3. Social
  4. Goal oriented
  5. Community minded
  6. Connected
  7. Multitaskers
  8. Preference for group work
  9. Aversion to reading and text
The results show that at BCIT there is no statistical difference between net gen and non-net gen students on items 1-5. But even for items 6-9, where there were statistically significant differences, the effect sizes were very small, representing only between 1.4% and 2.9% of the variance.

3 comments:

Mark said...

Hi Mark, can you provide a URL to the full report? Thanks.

Mark Bullen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mark Bullen said...

These are preliminary results. Once I have a full report I will post it.

What is your e-mail address, contact information?

Mark.