Investigation of Literacy Skills and Strategies Used While Searching for Information on the Internet: A Comprehensive Review and Synthesis of Research

The Internet is rapidly becoming a central source of information for the 21st century. Because the Internet contains so much information and because it is a poorly structured information domain, searching for information becomes central to success and reading becomes critical to this process. Reading on the Internet, especially when you search for information, differs in important ways from reading in traditional, print-based texts (International Reading Association, 2002; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro & Cammack, 2004; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002) thus requiring new reading skills. Reading search engine results, for example, requires new reading strategies for success. The information provided in the results summary consists of text formats that may be unfamiliar, such as uniform resource locators (URLs) that contain host information about a webpage. Searching for information on the Internet, and the literacy requirements this involves, is a central aspect of the new literacies that will define our students' futures (International Reading Association, 2002). A New Literacies Perspective (Leu, Kinzer, et al., 2004) posits first that although traditional literacy skills are still an important component of classroom instruction, new literacy skills are required for learning in online environments. These new literacy skills are grounded in five functions of learning on the Internet: 1) Identify an important question; 2) Search for information in an effective manner; 3) Critically evaluate the information encountered; 4) Synthesize information from multiple sources and in multiple forms; and 5) Communicate the information that has been located to others