Search Examples
In this example a student is given an assignment to research Naval Battles in the Pacific during World War II.
They open Google and type in World War II, This retrieves 106 million results. Far too many to comprehend. At this point, the most common response is to click the hyperlinks of the results. Students seldom go beyond the first ten results, many do not even scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Some students may refine their search at this point, typing in World War II naval Battles.
This produces around 2 million web sites.
While some seem relevant, have we really given students the tools to evaluate these sites. Who put together the web site? Do they have an agenda? How would a student recognize this? And how would they cite the information they obtain, showing the teacher where and when they retrieved this information.
This is not an effective use of the internet, but is fairly typical, 65% of students end their search task without finding what they are looking for.
Having a better understanding of how to search, how to evaluate and what it means to cite a reference will help students avoid many of the pitfalls in the above example.
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