At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, school closures meant more than 90% of the world's learners had to study virtually or from home. The Internet, already an invaluable educational tool, has therefore become even more important for students. One of the students' most common internet activities is online searching, both in schools and homeschooling. This means teachers, and those parents currently standing in for teachers, need to help students develop skills for searching online.
Unfortunately, research suggests some teachers don't offer such explicit instruction. Some also have trouble structuring (and providing support for) student online search tasks beyond lower-order skills. Evidence even exists of a lack of search skills among teachers and parents themselves.
The following three tips may help:
Focus on 'learning to search' and 'searching to learn'
Making the "invisible" processes behind searches more visible improves the online information-seeking of both teachers and students. In this way, educators (temporary or professional) should design activities that foreground the search process. This makes students more aware of what goes on "behind the scenes" of a search and their ability to affect these processes.
How might you do this? In one Queensland study, students were asked to sort 12 picture cards. The cards were designed in three "categories" — animals, transport modes and countries — which were obvious at first.
Students easily sorted the cards into these categories. But they were then challenged to recognise any other sorting options, much like Google does every second of every day. When "kangaroo" was removed from the "animals" pile and placed alongside "Australia" instead, for example, students were quick to assemble the remaining cards in a similar fashion.
Become more critical users of the web:
Educators sometimes set tasks that are too broad for students and likely to return millions of search results. Many will probably be irrelevant or inaccurate. Teachers may also set tasks that encourage students to use Google as a mere encyclopedia, which requires only passive lower-order learning. Asking students to find websites with conflicting information purposefully and to describe how they decided which to believe requires that they compare, evaluate and analyse.
The number of results a search engine returns can help indicate the quality of your query and make finding reliable information more efficient. In school, students report that they typically don't consider the number of results returned and have little experience in limiting or increasing these results. In Australian homeschooling, too, parent-educators and students rank "limiting/expanding searches" as one of the hardest steps in the search.
Now that students know a little more about how Google must sort websites, ask them to alter their query to rearrange the top five or ten results returned. Challenge them to reduce the (likely millions of) results returned to just 10,000, 1,000 or even ten.
Students explain that when only the final product or outcome of searching that "counts" or is graded, their focus is upon that and never the search process itself. This changes when tasks are more structured and specific requirements and guidance are given. Students then focus more upon gathering quality information.
Shift your thinking about search:
Attitudes have proven more important than available resources or even teacher skills when increasing students' authentic technology-enabled learning. Many limiting attitudes about search need to be turned around to ensure students get the most out of Google. We can start switching attitudes about what to search for and how by using the tips above. But what if your child doesn't want to listen to you during the search? This is commonly reported. Students don't always see their teachers as good information sources during search either. And it's true, some teachers and parents still have much to learn about using Google.
The answer is unlikely to be forcing your children to recognise your strengths and their weaknesses. Instead, shifting young people's attitude to search, and encouraging them to realise it is sometimes hard and frustrating, can help.
When it comes to schoolwork, data from over 45,000 students in 12 countries tell us internet research is "by far the most frequently recorded use of ICT". Educators who focus upon "learning to search" and "searching to learn", who encourage critical use, and begin to challenge attitudes about Google will be better placed to help students capitalise on the unprecedented educational opportunities online search can provide.
