Information Super-judgment

Blog Post for September 18th

Part of my job as C&I Director at LearningWorks is planning the curriculum for both the summer and school year programs. While my ultimate goal is to plan a two year curriculum crossing over the four different schooling periods our students our students have at LW, this school-year-program (SYP) needed to have an autonomous feel until I am able to really get everything nailed down. Part of the SYP curriculum this year is teaching students research skills.
As a result of this plan, I found myself teaching my teachers to teach the students to conduct productive and valid searches on the internet. I was surprised by the lack of knowledge even some of my older teachers seemed to lack.
In the Beach, Anson, Burech, and Swiss book, there is an extensive look at modeling my own search strategies and also on selecting which tools to use for which processes. I will admit, my first search method is often to go straight to Google and try to find the "easy" answer. This is true, I suppose, except for when writing a large research paper - in which case, I utilize my University resources and do searches of academic journals. Clearly I can not ask my middle school students to go into an academic journal and try to pick out journal articles to apply to any sort of knowledge quest or research they may be conducting. Even for most of my high school teachers, this task would be over their heads.
Even after trying to work with my teachers on how to aid your students in conducting research, one group in particular reported back that they had a difficult time getting students to conduct "good" research. What they found is that the middle school students had a hard time summarizing the information they were looking at. They would go to a page and want the title to be the main subject of the article, not wanting to look through it or take the time to take notes. After some brainstorming with my teaching group, we realized that if we had the given time, using a good Blog search and specific topics would help in narrowing the wide array of information the students were trying to navigate. Using a tool such as Google Blog search and then setting up a Bloglines account for each student would allow them to predict what the underlying theme of the article they were looking at should be. From there, summarizing the information would already have a context within what they were looking for. We will see if they utilize this option, and then see how it goes!