Staying Smart: How Today's Graduate Continue to Learn Once They Learn

The survey dataset is from a research report about the information-seeking behavior of relatively recent college graduates used for lifelong learning in personal life, the workplace, and the local communities where they lived. Included are results from online surveys of 1,651 respondents and telephone interviews with 126 study participants who graduated from one of 10 US colleges and universities between 2007 and 2012. Findings indicated that most graduates needed to learn a combination of basic and complex life skills during the past year, such as money-management, how to make household repairs, and how to advance in their careers and communicate better on the job. They consulted friends, family, and coworkers almost as much as the Web. Graduates preferred information sources that had currency, utility, and interactivity. They also placed a high premium on curated information systems that were organized and kept up-to-date, such as libraries, museums, and bookstores. A model of shared utility is introduced for explaining graduates’ use of contemporary social media technologies as well as personal connections they had established with trusted allies. Graduates reported four barriers to their continued learning efforts: lack of time, finding affordable learning sources, staying on top of everything they needed to know, and staying motivated to keep learning after college. As a whole, graduates prided themselves on their ability to search, evaluate, and present information, skills they honed during college. Yet, far fewer said that their college experience had helped them develop the critical thinking skill of framing and asking questions of their own, which is a skill they inevitably needed in their post-college lives. Ten recommendations are presented for improving educational strategies, resources, and services that foster lifelong learning.The Project Information Literacy (PIL) lifelong learning survey dataset was produced as part of a two-year federally funded study on relatively recent US college graduates and their information-seeking behavior for continued learning. The goal of the survey was to collect quantitative data about the information-seeking behavior of a sample of recent graduates—the strategies, techniques, information support systems, and best practices—used to support lifelong learning in post-college life. The dataset contains responses from 1,651 respondents to a 21-item questionnaire administered between October 9, 2014 and December 15, 2014. The voluntary sample of respondents consisted of relatively recent graduates, who had completed their degrees between 2007 and 2012, from one of 10 US colleges and universities in the institutional sample. Quantitative data are included in the dataset about the learning needs of relatively recent graduates as well as the information sources they used in three arenas of their post-college lives (i.e., personal life, workplace, and the communities in which they resided). Demographic information—including age, gender, major, GPA, employment status, graduate school attendance, and geographic proximity of current residence to their alma mater—is also included in the dataset for the respondents.Institute of Museum of Library Service, (LG-06-13-0186-13