Blurts

The most recent Pew study of online behavior offers insight into how adolescents conduct online research. The study surveyed advanced placement and National Writing Project teachers which if anything would likely result in a positive bias.

These educators offered an evaluation that was more positive than negative. The positives mostly focused on the wealth of information available and the independence exhibited by students in using these resources. I tend to focus on negatives that might identify issues to be addressed.

A substantial proportion of the teachers felt that students lacked the capacity to evaluate the credibility of information.

• Continued attention to the identification of bias would seem important. Comparison of the positions taken in several hits might be one way to explore this issue. Is the information consistent?

The teachers also seemed to indicate that students were impatient in the search process. They seemed to expect to locate information quickly and were overly reliant on the search engine (mostly Google) to provide answers to their questions.

• I would propose that students may need to learn to conduct more sophisticated searches and to examine multiple responses. Perhaps they should be required to summarize what they learned from several pages at various positions in the list of “hits”.