Motoko Rich: “Wealthier students tend to perform better on tests of reading comprehension than their poorer peers, a longstanding trend that has been documented amply. But with the Internet having become an indispensable part of daily life, a new study shows that a separate gap has emerged, with lower-income students again lagging more affluent students in their ability to find, evaluate, integrate and communicate the information they find online. The new research, led by Donald J. Leu at the University of Connecticut, is appearing this month in Reading Research Quarterly. Although the study is based on a small sample, it demonstrates a general lack of online literacy among all students, indicating that schools have not yet caught up to teach the skills needed to navigate digital information. Although youngsters are experts at texting, posting photographs on Instagram and upgrading to the newest social media app while their parents are trying to decipher Facebook, children are still not adept at using the Web to find reliable information. The study, which focused on seventh-grade students from two middle schools in Connecticut, compared reading test scores from the federal exams often known as the Nation’s Report Card as well as results of assessments that required students to perform tasks such as researching the question “are energy drinks heart healthy?” using multiple web resources. The students were evaluated on such things as whether they could use keywords effectively in search engines, determine the credibility of a website, discern the bias of an Internet author and communicate their findings through email.”