Research in the Digital Age: It’s More Than Finding Information…
The Role of Research in the Digital Age
We
all know that the Internet has led to an explosion of available
information. When students search for information about a topic, they
are
met with a plethora of articles, from both credible and non-credible
resources. The skill of research has always been considered to be a
pillar of the social studies discipline, though the nature of research
itself has been rapidly changing as the Internet
develops and our society becomes less dependant on paper-bound books.
As social studies teachers, it is our job to be cognizant of how these
changes are having an impact on our discipline.
The Encyclopedia
Gone are the days of
consulting the ever-trustworthy Encyclopedia Britannica; there used to
be an inherent trust we could have that the information we found was the
most relevant to our query, was presented
in a (relatively) unbiased way, and was accurate. Now, finding the
information is only a small fraction of the challenge of research.
Students must now discern if the source they found contains accurate,
factual, and documented information. Once they have
done that, they must determine what the purpose of their source is, and
whether or not it is presenting the information in a significantly
skewed manner. This skill set is commonly found as part of
university-level history curriculum, but now students as young
as 4th grade need to begin developing this proficiency.
The Value of a Website
After receiving too many research papers that relied
solely on Wikipedia, we realized that these skills needed to be
explicitly taught, and that they needed to be developed in our social
studies class. When looking for previously published curricula
about Internet skills, we found Common Sense Media’s Test Before You
Trust materials, which were exactly what we were looking for. They guide
students through asking tough questions about each source: Is the bias
readily apparent? Who paid for the website?
How many sources are cited for their information? Thanks to this
material, students can at least ask the right questions about the online
source.
In order to have the skills to evaluate a source found on
the Internet, we need to not only teach tools to do this –like those
found in Common Sense Media’s Test Before You Trust materials– but we
need to teach how to evaluate the perspective
of the sources students read, and to students even younger than before.
In other words: we need to teach about bias.
Perspective
Obviously, before the advent of the Internet, historians
wrote from particular perspectives. The perspective of the author of a
primary source was written from the perspective of personal experience.
The letters of Abigail Adams reflect her
perspective on politics, women’s rights, and slavery in a different
way from the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Throughout history,
historians have looked at events through the lens of their own biases–
their writings are colored by their politics, culture,
and experience. Also, the availability of certain information to those
historians limited what they could and couldn’t write about. It wasn’t
as often though, when we were in middle school, that students
encountered a secondary source or tertiary source beyond
the encyclopedia–so teaching about bias wasn’t as necessary.
Instead now,
secondary and tertiary sources on the Internet can be found by anyone
and written by anyone–evaluating the bias of the source plays an
important part in evaluating whether the site is useful. Since
the Internet is not peer reviewed like academic journals, students are
going to have to do the evaluation themselves. We teach our history
students to evaluate bias by reading two different sources writing from
different perspectives on the same historical
event. Students find the details in the text that help shed light on
what a source’s perspective is. Students find telling adjectives, figure
out what information is included, what is omitted. Everything is data.
Analysis and Evaluation in Social Studies Research
The
tools used for detecting the bias of a source, and the critical
thinking skills they require, must become part of social studies
curriculum,
and earlier now than ever before. However, critical thinking skills of
evaluation and analysis that are required to detect bias aren’t
necessarily developed until students reach the formative operations
stage described by Piaget. While the seeds of perspective
analysis need to be planted early, some students may not yet be
developmentally ready for learning how to discern on their own. To
assist them, there are tools to help sort through the vast amount of
resources available. For example, search engines like SweetSearch
only display results appropriate for students (though that doesn’t mean
the sites they find are without bias).
Today, people are not
necessarily considered knowledgeable based on how much information they
know, but by how much facility they have with that information. As
teachers in the discipline of history we have
to own the idea that teaching students how to analyze and evaluate the
information they find is more important than
gathering that information
together in one place. We ask our students to research, but it is not
simply about finding information anymore. Students will need to sift
through multiple perspectives on the Internet, and
ultimately decide which perspectives are valuable and useful for their
purpose. As social studies teachers, we have to show them HOW to
research.
Nitin Joshi
Librarian
