Understanding Internet Search and Evaluation Strategies During Fifth Graders’ Group Work

Colin Harrison

Learning Sciences Research Institute /

School of Education

University of Nottingham

Understanding Internet Search and Evaluation Strategies During Fifth Graders’ Group Work

Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D. J. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of research on new literacies. Routledge.

Harrison, C., Dwyer, B., & Castek, J. (2014). Using technology to improve reading and learning. Shell Education, California, USA.

New skills and strategies for critical literacy in a post-typographical world

What are the ‘new skills and strategies’? Who says we need them?

The British Library:

25 million books

The Internet:

A room with 2.5 billion doors

PEN-CILPlan Evaluate Navigate- Critical Internet LiteracyInternet research triads: Constructive goal-setting, collaboration and mutual support

PLANNER- what’s our task? where should we go, and what should we do when we get there? 

Select evidence: Copy / move / change / delete? Summarise source Synthesise across sources

NAVIGATOR- how do we get there? Select good search terms Evaluate URL possibilities Evaluate URL appropriateness on landing Look for key words

EVALUATOR- are we there yet?

Are we understanding? Language too difficult? Do we trust this source? If so, why? Are we answering our research question?

Tasks developed in collaboration with Bernadette Dwyer (2010) and Shiri Einav (UoN) Thank you!

PEN-CIL Task:‘How many stars can you see in the sky?’

PEN-CIL Stars sites

PEN-CIL Study ‘How many stars can you see in the sky?’

• Answer the research question, using information from the six sites• Give a score 1-6: How relevant is the information on this site?• Give a score 1-6: How much do you trust the information on this site?

- Seven triads of students (mean age 11.6)- 25 minutes to carry out the task- Audio recording of the group conversation- Reminder after 10 minutes to look again at the research question

175-minute/26,500-word corpusEffective research strategies?Less effective research strategies?

The task:

Data collection:

PEN-CIL Study ECER 2015 presentation Skill area Tactic Undesirable DesirableInternet reading strategies

Read task carefully Proceed with poor understanding of task

Proceed with good understanding of task

Read text fully Read every word aloud ‘Let’s skim’

Neglect to scroll down Scroll down and read all of the text

Be alert/suspicious Attracted to eye candy Mistrust advertisements

Fail to consider author’s purpose

Mistrust over-friendly tone

Comprehension/inference Read between the lines Fail to monitor comprehension

Monitor individual and group comprehension

Make premature decisions Make late decisions

Fail to integrate information across source(s)

Integrate information across source(s)

Group processes Collaboration P-E-N Roles not clear P-E-N Roles clear

Fail to fulfill roles Fulfill roles

Ignore opinions of other group members

Make joint decisions on relevance and trustworthiness

PEN-CIL Study LRA 2016 Re-analysis of discourse data

Vygotsky: learning as a socio-cognitive phenomenon Learning = = obuchenie

- learning- education

Obuchenie = - teaching - studying - nurture

Neil Mercer: learning as a dialogic process

Learner + learner + learner = unreflective, uncooperative talk

Learner + learner+ learner + explicit aims + ‘ground rules’ for talk = ‘Inter-thinking’

- critical, constructive talk- collaborative problem solving- knowledge creation

2015

PEN-CIL Study

ECER 2015 presentation

PEN-CIL Study

LRA 2016 presentation

Skill area Desirable Discourse marker Dialogic Inter-thinking

Skill area Tactic Undesirable Desirable

Skill area Desirable Discourse marker

Dialogic Inter-thinking

Internet reading strategies

Strategic reading

Chloe: ‘Shall we, like, skim read and see if we can find anything?’

Jessica: “Let’s just look and see if it answers our question, because our question is ‘How many stars can we see in the sky?’ So we don’t just have to look for the biggest amount of numbers.” Hannah: “Yes, let’s just skim read it…”

Cautious reading- considering provenance, language and aims of web site

Cameron: “Already I don’t trust this website- because anyone can put anything on it.”

Chloe: “Why are there cars [on this website]?” Jessica: [on the car advertisements] – “I don’t trust it… They’re just trying to get money out of the website.’ Hannah: “It’s relevant- but this is just blah-de-blah. I don’t trust it at all. Because the language they use is like I would talk to Jessica or you guys on the playground.”

Paige: “It’s trying to sound like it’s your friend. this is just blah-di-blah.”

Chelsie: “This one is concise; the other one has got larger words and stuff; so I trust this one.” Olivia: “Sky and Telescope did have the most scientific language…but the best way to get information is to look it up in a book.”Logan: “Wikipedia gave really really good content- but it was so irrelevant.” Olivia: “ Yeah- it was nothing that we could use.”Logan: “If you’re doing your project, and you copy it all from Wikipedia, you probably won’t get any marks.”

Skill area

Desir-able

Discourse marker Dialogic Inter-thinking

Compre-hension/inference

Clarify/summarise content

Chloe: ’I don’t think it’s relevant because it doesn’t say how many stars there are.”

Chelsie: “We don’t need to know that!”[ie it’s irrelevant; repeats research question]Olivia: “maybe it’s a bit more relevant, but it doesn’t say what we want it to say.’Logan ”I trust it but the relevance of the web site is low.”

Monitoring own and others’ compre-hension

Hildegard: “Are you actually taking any of this in?“Amie: “No!”

Amie: “But this is all about stars, not about how many you can see-“ Hildergard: “Exactly.”

Return to reconsider key areas

Lucy: “Let’s look at them all again. … we need to go on the one we trust most and look at that again.”

Hannah: “Lets go back and look at the positives and negatives about them. This one you can tell it’s real because it’s got a caption below the picture.” Chloe: “Yeah.” Hannah: “And you know the other web site, some web sites just want you to ‘like’ them on Facebook.”

Skill area

Desirable Discourse marker Dialogic Inter-thinking

Group pro-cesses

Role clarification

Amie: “I’m the Evaluator, so I'm trying to see that we’re doing the right thing.”Lawrence: “I’m the navigator and you’re the planner…” Hildegard: “I’m supposed to be telling you guys what to do.”

Collabor-ation

Logan: ”We’ve got to work together… ‘cos working together is key to answering the question.”

Ben: “It’s probably the best one [site] we’ve seen so far…” Lucas: ” Hmm… but none of them have been really accurate, because…”

Chelsie: “Let’s go back and look at the positives and negatives about them. This one you can tell it’s real because it’s got a caption below the picture.” Olivia: “Yeah.” Chelsie: “And you know the other web site, some web sites just want you to ‘like’ them on Facebook.”Olivia: ”So we’ve gone through all the web sites, and we’ve gone through all the relevant…. EarthSky definitely answered our question and gave us extra information.” Logan :“Yes- Sky and Telescope and EarthSky are similar- did you notice that? They are similar and they are the most relevant.”

PEN-CIL Study LRA 2016 presentation

CONCLUSIONS

Potentially useful for teachers? Maybe….

Skill area Desirable Discourse markers Dialogic Inter-thinking?

for Critical Internet Literacy?

Some evidence of obuchenie and peer-peer scaffolding – but it’s incredibly difficult to capture ‘knowledge creation’

Personal Internet Inquiry (Coiro, Castek, Quinn, 2016)

Plus

Obuchenie +Inter-thinking

Colin Harrison

Learning Sciences Research Institute /

School of Education

University of Nottingham

Understanding Internet Search and Evaluation Strategies During Fifth Graders’ Group Work