The nation's primary and junior high school students lack the skills to sift through and link information from multiple sources to solve problems, even though they can easily understand spoon-fed, pre-filtered information, a government study has found.

In what education officials called the first test of its kind on elementary and junior high students, the education ministry tested the students' information retrieval skills using various presentations of data, including made-up web pages.

One analyst said the findings, released Tuesday, highlight how far behind Japanese children are in information literacy compared with other nations.