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
