“It wasn’t so much that students were inefficient in their use of Google, but rather that students are often ill-equipped to sufficiently evaluate or refine the results that are returned,” says Andrew Asher, an anthropologist at Bucknell University and one of the project leads. “…I don’t think this is a problem limited to students.”
“They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results,” adds an article on the study by Inside Higher Ed. “Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)”
Just want to say that I deal with this every day. For being the children supposedly born ready to use technology, my current students are awful at researching, word processing, and file management in general. They are also the first generation to have gone from beginning to finish in the No Child Left Behind program.
These kids can't think critically and have been spoon fed information for tests and from basic search queries their whole lives. They need to be asked much more often to read in context and question the validity of what they read about.
Of course, this is only one study... but I have a confirmation bias because the majority of my students have this issue.
Democracy is worthless with an uninformed public.
Thank you for sharing this research with us. This makes me think of certain people I know who research certain topics on Google and accept the information given by the first entry solely because it is listed first. I believe it is crucial at a high school to teach proper researching skills. Without learning these skills we all become victim to not being able to detect faulty information from its correct counterpart, which is obviously problematic especially as we get older. You also raise an important issue when you reference NCLB because teaching to the test is fruitless. What good is it to teach students how to take a test? How many written tests are they actually going to take when they finish school anyway? We must educate students on how to think freely and become truly educated in many content areas. If not the future of the nation, as you have anticipated, will be doomed.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you posted this blog because I was having a similar conversation with my cooperating fieldwork teacher. Recently she assigned her English honors students a research paper. She reserved time in the media center to give the students a chance to get a head start on researching their topic. SO MANY students came up to her asking to change their topic because they "couldn't find any information". My teacher didn't want any of her students changing their topics anymore and mentioned in class that she didn't think they were giving the project their all. She commented that if the students wanted to know if Lady Gaga was arrested and why, they would look up everything possible to get an answer. My teacher said that her project should get the same respect and thoughtfulness.
ReplyDeleteSid enote, google has been repeatedly bashed for offering services and websites they are affiliated with instead of the most relevant websites. This was originally what made their service so popular -- the fact that paid sites were not always at top.
ReplyDeleteThese days, google uses an algorithm to decide what search results will be best for you. That means if all of us searched "education" we would have different results. This is invisible censorship -- most users have no idea that what they search has been predetermined and is biased on their web searching habits. Google probably calls this "efficiency" or "social"
All the more reason that students need to think critically and learn research skills.