'So Far I've Only Found His Head'
A new study shows how fifth-graders search electronically
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2000
How is it that students can find the 20 most authoritative Pokemon sites in five minutes but not know how to find a synonym for "rainforest"?
To help us plumb mysteries like this one, Sandra G. Hirsh of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories published an article, "Children's Relevance Criteria and Information Seeking on Electronic Resources," in Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 50, No. 14 (1999). Her findings aren't surprising to any of us who work with computers and students. She knows kids are "enthusiastic users of electronic resources, often preferring them to their print counterparts." Their enthusiasm, however, isn't matched by their skills at formulating effective searches. But she discovered better ways to teach students to use electronic resources--the most important being to train them using a topic in which they have a strong personal interest.
How did Hirsh come to study children's electronic information-seeking behavior? Her interest grew out of her work with the Science Library Catalog Project, a UCLA/CalTech project that aimed to develop an early hypertext online catalog for elementary school students. But when the Net--and the Web--came along, she realized that they were rapidly throwing her previous conclusions, and those of other researchers, up into the air. "While children before had searched for information in highly structured and carefully constructed electronic resources," such as online catalogs and CD-ROM databases, Hirsh says, they were now expected to find the same kinds of information on the Web, a "much more uncontrolled and unfiltered" beast. How were kids making decisions about choosing information from the Web?
Hirsh studied a group of typical computer-savvy fifth graders at an Arizona school who had been assigned to find information about a sports figure of their choice. Although she found that students considered tables of contents, annotations, and indexes when choosing resources, they took what they found very literally. Most of them simply matched their assignment topic words (like "Babe Ruth" and "home run record") to what they found online, showing little inclination to think in synonyms, or to investigate resources that didn't use those exact words. Hirsh found that the students neglected to write down useful URLs they encountered during their searching, and they would type the same query into a search tool over and over because they didn't know any other way to get to sites they had already visited.
More important is her finding that even after the librarian had instructed the children how to check Internet resources for authority and accuracy, they assigned authority and accuracy little weight when selecting sources. Instead, they chose their sources by novelty--is this something about my subject I haven't already read?--how personally interesting the information was, and how appealing it would be to peers when they presented their reports orally.
Watching students use the Web, most of us know how important images are to them. Although finding a picture of an athlete was a small part of the assignment, the kids spent a disproportionate amount of time searching for just the right picture. A student searching through pictures of basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon told Hirsh, "But I still need a picture of him… I mean like a whole picture of him. So far I've only found his head."
Hirsh came out of her study convinced that we must "teach children how to be critical information consumers." She recommends that librarians teach students the differences among the search tools--that Google, for instance, will present different results than Alta Vista. Hirsh also thinks that students need navigation skills beyond hitting the "Back" button. They need to know how to create and sort bookmarks and use the "Find" function on a single page. And most critically, they need to hear--again and again--about the importance of checking one source against others, and not to believe everything they read on a screen.
