The information culture of teenagers in the context of modern education paradigm

Abstract

The growing information streams and expanding information space have made information easy accessible while the need for its filtration, critical reevaluation, and clear-cut assessment criteria emerged. The younger generation has to master skills of retrieving, analyzing and using reliable information to support their lives, career and social success. Being skillful Internet users, the teenagers yet demonstrate the low level of information culture. However, the requirement to educate information culture is formulated in The Federal State Educational Standard of Comprehensive Secondary Education (FGOS) in the disciplines “Mathematics”, “Informatics” and “Literature”. The results of the regional stage of the All-Russian Olympiad of School Students – the republican Olympiad in the personal information culture (Republic of Buryatia) – have demonstrated non-conformity of teenagers’ performance with the FGOS standard. No similar Olympiads are held in other RF regions, which makes the study particularly valuable. The authors emphasize that the Olympiad in this subject area has to be implemented in other regions. They applied several research methods to assess information literacy, namely empirical (observation, comparison) and theoretical (analysis, generalization). The analysis is based on students’ answers. The newness of the study lies in characterizing information culture of Buryat schoolchildren and specifying major challenges, substantiating and extending obtained data, and suggesting new vectors of information culture regional studies.