How to Teach Electronic Research Skills in the Library to Middle School Students
Although today's middle school students have lived with the Internet all of their lives, they don't necessarily know how to use it wisely. Students who use the Internet for classroom research risk using inaccurate sources or searching with inefficient terms leading to pages of unrelated links. Teach your students to be savvy Internet users, searching efficiently and evaluating sources.
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Things You'll Need
- Handout
- KWL chart -- optional
- Computer
- Projector
- Websites with accurate and inaccurate information
Instructions
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Prepare a handout that includes every link you will use in your presentation, a list of Boolean search terms and a list of criteria for evaluating websites. Alternatively, leave several blank spaces on the handouts that the students must fill in with correct terms as they learn them in the lesson.
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Find an accurate and an inaccurate website about a single topic to use as examples in class. Use a website that collects urban legends, misinformation and conspiracy theories on the Internet -- such as Snopes -- to serve as a jumping off point for finding inaccurate sites.
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Ask the students how they find information online and how they can tell whether a site has accurate information. Alter your lesson depending on how much your students already know. Assess their knowledge by giving them a KWL chart -- a three-column chart with columns labeled "K," "W," and "L." Ask the students to write what they know about Internet research in the first column and what they want to know in the second column. Tell them to write any new information they learn from the lesson in the third column.
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Give the students a list of approved search engines that they can use in their research, including those specifically for children and preteens that automatically filter responses, ensuring that the students don't stumble across an inappropriate website and eliminating some unhelpful hits from their searches. Tell the students to try all of the engines to see which one gets them the most useful results. Use the projector to show the students the different results you get when you type a topic like "seals" into each search engine.
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Teach students how to use Boolean search functions, including AND, OR, NOT and quotation marks. Using one search engine, show them the various results you get typing keywords such as "seals AND endangered," "seals OR walruses," "seals NOT gaskets," and "harbor seals" with and without quotation marks. Explain that some search engines use Boolean functions such as "AND" automatically and they'll need to experiment with their favorite engine.
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Explain to students that anyone can make a website or blog regardless of their knowledge on a topic. Bring up your inaccurate website and ask students to look for clues that it isn't a good source, including poor grammar, out-of-date information, obvious bias or lack of sources. Describe any clues that they did not find or that were not present on that particular site. Point out that most websites list the time when they were most recently updated.
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Bring up your accurate website and ask students to evaluate it. Look for a credentialed author, well-documented sources, an address ending in .edu or .gov, objective statement of facts and professional presentation. Identify any indicators they may have missed. Explain to the students that if they have any doubts about a site's accuracy, they should double-check it against one of the library's reference books. Use all the library resources to verify or discredit information found online.
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Show websites with user-created content. Bring up a site that has user-created content and demonstrate that you can edit it to include obvious misinformation (do not click "submit" in case repeated abuse of the website causes the administrators to block your computer from editing it). Explain that anyone can do this at any time and therefore these sites cannot be trusted as a source of information.
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References
Resources
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