Researching in a Digital World

How do I teach my students to conduct quality online research?

Erik Palmer

• Editorial: ASCD
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781416620235
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación general

As digital natives, our students are certainly at home online, but how much do they know about using the Internet as a research tool? Do they know how to ask the right questions, find the best and most credible resources, evaluate the "facts" they come across, and avoid plagiarism and copyright violations when they incorporate others' work into their own? For too many, the answer is noÑand research projects intended to engage students in independent learning wind up wasting time or creating incomplete or faulty understandings.

In this step-by-step guide, classroom veteran Erik Palmer explains how to teach students at all grade levels to conduct deeper, smarter, and more responsible research in an online environment. You'll find practical lesson ideas for every stage of the research process and dozens of tips and strategies that will build your students' Internet literacy, establish valuable academic habits, and foster skills for lifelong learning.

The Need for Internet Literacy

Do you send your students to the Internet to do research? I ask teachers this question when I lead workshops, and overwhelmingly, their answer is yes—even in the primary grades. Then I ask if they teach any specific lessons to prepare students for researching in an online environment. Equally overwhelmingly, their answer is no. Because our students are digital natives, right? Even the youngest of them seems able to intuit how to manipulate all kinds of digital devices, how to create and upload content, and how to find entertaining things online. This leads us to assume they are Internet competent and completely web savvy. But do they really understand how to find the best of places for research and how to analyze all the sites their device dexterity helps them find? The answer is no.

Here is something else I’ve learned from my workshops: Teachers absolutely believe that teaching Internet literacy is necessary. Yet it isn’t happening—and not because of the time constraints, although that is certainly a factor. The main issue is that many of us don’t have a great deal of Internet literacy ourselves. The intricacies and operation of Wikipedia, domain name suffixes, search engines, browsers, how to find who is publishing particular site content, how Google decides what to list first on a search page, how to use punctuation to get better search results—for many of us, these remain mysteries.

Student Struggles with Online Research

I happened to be in Oregon recently. As you may know, that part of the country is the home of the endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis), the cephalopod that is born in the ocean but comes ashore to live in the forests along the Oregon coast. I wrote about the animal and the website devoted to it (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) in my book Teaching the Core Skills of Listening & Speaking (Palmer, 2014). I didn’t see any tree octopi on any of my walks, but I didn’t expect to—unlike many of the students I’ve taught, who visited the website and had trouble recognizing it as an elaborate hoax. The trip reminded me of the kinds of struggles students have with online research:

• Uncertainty about what words to put into the browser’s search box
• Overreliance—often exclusive reliance—on Google
• Difficulty figuring out which of the 34,219,300 search results returned is the best place to start
• Never looking beyond the first page of results
• Inability to assess the purpose of a site
• Never checking or considering the authority of the site’s authors
• Not knowing how to evaluate a site’s credibility
• Copying information and images without under­standing plagiarism or copyright

These and other issues make clear that we have some work to do to prepare our students before we send them online. Without that preparation, projects that could engage students in independent learning and critical thinking end up wasting learning time, yielding bad information, and creating both bad habits and faulty understanding.

Much of what I will share in this book was learned the hard way. For years, I had my students do a research project I called “Planetary Problem Solving”—a project easily adaptable to all grade levels and a variety of subject areas. The set-up was simple: Choose a current global problem (e.g., acid rain, overpopulation, world hunger, heart disease), research it, and report out, citing at least three online references. What I didn’t do was provide any instruction to build my students’ Internet literacy. Problems followed.

I have structured this book in a way that I hope is useful. We will proceed through the process of researching online. In each section, I will give some background knowledge to share with students and then use a Planetary Problem Solving example—childhood obesity—to illustrate how this insight might be applied. In the end, I hope you will walk away with a practical approach for preparing your students to conduct truly effective online research.

The Challenge for Teachers

Let’s be honest: the Internet was not designed with students in mind—and certainly not elementary students. I once watched a 2nd grade teacher hand each student a Chromebook, assign them a country to report about, and direct them to www.safesearchkids.com. After that, she left them to their own devices. Students inputted “Brazil” or “Italy” and got flooded with results—all kinds of sites, both credible and dubious. The kids who weren’t distracted by ads and pop-ups dutifully copied information into their notebooks, even words and information they didn’t understand.

The digital natives in our classroom still need our guidance in the form of information that will help them be savvier and more efficient researchers. They need our support in the form of practical strategies that they can use to think more critically about the “facts” they find online. Adapt the ideas in this publication for your grade level. Modify its action items as needed. And always be vigilant as your students search, especially if they are very young.

Before Students Go Online

Our students have never known a world without the Internet, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t benefit from a little tutorial about some of the basics of its operation. Let’s start there.

Logistics and Key Terms

What is happening when we “go online”? It is useful for students (and adults) to understand some key terms and logistics.

The Internet is not a place. Nor is it an all-knowing, all-wise source of knowledge. It is a vast network of interconnected computers. Students commonly say, “I found it on the Internet,” yet the information we find when we research is not “on the Internet”; it’s on some computer tied in to that network. This is important knowledge to share with students to begin creating a healthy skepticism. We can’t be sure of the validity of the information found on the computers tied into the network. The Internet itself is not a resource; it’s what allows us to access resources.

Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was taking off, it was common to talk about it as “the World Wide Web.” The terminology seems quaint now, and your students may not even recognize the “www.” at the beginning of Internet addresses as its abbreviation. But it really is helpful to think of the Internet as a worldwide web—a collection of documents and other resources that have been formatted with Internet protocols that allow them to be accessed. The most common of these protocols is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, which gives us the “http:” in Internet addresses. Your computer is part of the Internet because your router, cable, and wires link you to the network; the files on your personal computer (lesson plans and family photos, among others) are not part of the Internet because they are not formatted in a web-searchable way.

A browser gives you access to the Internet. Web browsers are computer programs that access files linked to the web and display them on your computer. “Plug-ins” built into the software allow you to see documents, videos, games, and images, and to hear audio from files and other computer users. It is common in schools for students to get a message similar to “File cannot be displayed. Plug-in required.” This means that the browser does not have the software needed to display the media.

There are lots of browsers available. Microsoft computers come with Internet Explorer installed; Apple computers come with Safari. There are also Firefox, Google Chrome, Bing, Opera, Torch, SeaMonkey, and many, many more. Each has its fans. A browser is generally judged by how fast it loads; how often it crashes; how easily it allows a user to create and organize bookmarks and tabs; whether it includes features like auto-fill, password memorization, and customizable pages; and so on. Browsers all have a URL line, the place where we input the Uniform Resource Locator (URL)—the web address. If we know the address of a site, we can simply input it and go straight to the site. Similarly, sometimes teachers have great sites they want students to visit, and they can just provide the links. That’s easy. It is also not the topic of this book. The real fun begins when we don’t give students the answer and ask them to go looking.

Action Item: Internet Terminology 101. Review with students the definitions of Internet, web, browser, and URL. As appropriate for your grade level, ask questions to ensure that they understand the key terms in Internet searching. Create or have students create a visual flowchart of the process of searching. For example, show the process “a URL tells the browser what you’re looking for, and the browser searches the web. The web is searchable because of the Internet.” Adapt the language as necessary for your grade level.

Crafting Questions to Guide Research

A 6th grade health teacher wants her students to find out about the harmful effects of cigarette smoking. Kim volunteers to find information online and report back to the class. He enters “cigarette smoking” in the search box at www.google.com. He returns to class with his facts:

• Eighteen percent of high school boys smoke cigars.
• In 1964, 42 percent of adults smoked cigarettes.
• It is common for people gain 5 to 10 pounds when they quit smoking.

This is information related to smoking, but none of it fulfills the purpose of the assignment: to explain the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes. What went wrong?

Research is about finding answers. This seems like an obvious statement to make, but it carries an important truth that’s easy to forget: finding answers assumes you have questions. Students doing research typically say things such as, “I am looking up Brown v. Board of Education” or “I am researching Albert Einstein,” or, in Kim’s case, “I am finding out about cigarette smoking.”

We can trace Kim’s research problem to the way he phrased his search. Without good guiding questions, students like Kim find and write down all kinds of random and trivial facts, winding up with an unfocused collection of information. Effective research, then, begins with meaningful questions. Having students brainstorm search questions and winnow them down into a tight list is a way to promote focused, efficient online research and lead students to an understanding of big ideas.

Action Item: What’s the Question? In the primary grades (K–2), it’s best to think of online searches as scavenger hunts designed to familiarize students with what it means to use the Internet to find information. Give them a form with key search questions related to the topic they are studying. For example, if everyone has chosen an animal to research, you might provide this set of questions:

1. How tall is this animal?
2. How much does this animal weigh when it is an adult?
3. Where does this animal live?
4. What does this animal eat?

In grades 3 and above, try putting students in groups of three or four to brainstorm guiding questions. Challenge them to generate as many Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions as they can for each topic. A 9th grader investigating childhood obesity might collaborate with classmates to generate questions such as these:

1. What makes kids obese?
2. What health problems are caused by obesity?
3. What social problems do obese kids have?
4. What is the definition of obese?
5. What is the difference between obese and overweight?
6. What are some ways children can lose weight?
7. What percent of kids are obese now?
8. What percent of adults are obese?
9. What country has the most obese children?
10. How likely is it that obese kids will grow up to be obese adults?

Ask students to give each question a ranking: “I absolutely have to find this out,” “I’d like to find this out,” or “I could skip this.” The questions that interest them most and seem most important are those they should use to begin their research. Step in as needed to review the students’ questions and keep them moving toward an essential understanding of the topic.

Formatting Search Questions

Typically, students can enter the questions they generate (or you provide) directly into the search box of most search engines. This approach often produces better results than entering one or two key words. But there are other ways to frame a question for Internet searching—ways that will not only generate a more focused collection of relevant results but also challenge students to think creatively and critically as they search.

Boolean searches. A good librarian will tell students to refine searches with Boolean search terms. George Boole was a 19th-century mathematician credited with developing a new area of algebra. There were three key operations in his system: AND, OR, and NOT. Often, adding these operations to search questions can produce more efficient search results.

• Add AND: Typing AND (or &) between key words will yield only results where both terms are present. If we think in terms of a Venn diagram, AND returns results that fall in the intersection of the circles—not resources linked to any of the key words but resources linked to both. Let’s say I already have information about how the number of obese children in the United States has changed over the last few years. Entering childhood obesity AND health risks into my search engine will limit the results to resources that discuss the health risks correlated with childhood obesity; entering childhood obesity AND school problems will target information about how schools are affected by the problem.
• Add OR: Typing OR (or / ) between key words will return results that include either or both key words. It’s a good choice when researchers aren’t sure what key words will pull up the information they’re looking for. Perhaps I’m curious how obesity affects high school students. Entering teen OR teenage OR adolescent AND obesity will cast a wider net and bring more results.
• Add NOT: With some search engines, inserting NOT (or – ) between key words will limit the search results. This is especially useful if the search terms entered have multiple meanings. Entering oxygen will take you to a TV network, an element in the periodic table, a Google font, an XML ed...