One thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is that students here are, as a group, much more impatient than the ones at my former school. This isn’t to say that they are more rude — just that they seem willing to give up more quickly. Which initially seemed odd, given that they have far more resources at their disposal.

For example, I was only a few minutes into looking for information on a rather obscure piece of music for concert band when the person I was helping suddenly walked away, claiming the search was taking too much time.

For the most part, I’ve come to think this impatience is a matter of expectation. My former students would often modify or completely change a research topic because of a lack of easily available resources, but students here aren’t used to working with that sort of limitation.

This post makes a related point:

By enabling the rapid delivery of full-text content from a vast mix of resources, when just all right results requires little thought, our digital library environment provides exactly what a spoiler generation student needs. Getting right to the end without going through the process – and having no experience from which to learn.

I don’t for a second think that that impatient student approaches everything in the same instant-satisfaction way — not even every assigned paper or project. Some things just pique our interest more than others. Sometimes, we just don’t care if we read the spoiler first.

However, the focus of so many assignments is the product and not the process that students often don’t even think that they’re doing the research equivalent of reading a spoiler. They’re just impatient and unengaged and trying to jump through one more hoop.

In a way, this is related to Dorothea’s question about why we teach database searching (see this post for the answers folks gave her). How often will any of these students do any research outside of school that will require them to do more than satisfice? How often will they need the best possible information as opposed to simply the information that gets them where they want to go?

That student with the music question wasn’t interested in being taught information literacy skills. They just wanted an answer, and left when that answer was not quickly forthcoming. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it — it’s just understandable impatience during finals week.