Forthcoming: College Acces, Social Media, and Working Class Youth in Computers & Ed
Nicole Ellison, D.Y. Wohn, and I have a piece forthcoming in the January issue of Computers & Education about the information seeking behavior of working class youth from urban and rural communities as they explore their post-secondary options. The whole article is worth reading (really!), but in brief:
- Low-income youth are adept at accessing information about college through social media participation and through their life-wide use of the Internet.
- They encounter challenges when attempting to make relevance judgements about the information they access, and they have difficulty applying what they’ve learned during their college choice process.
- Low-income youth need knowledgeable translators, who have knowledge of and experience with post-secondary institutions, to help them make relevance judgements and apply information.