Chat Room-Not So Elementary
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2001
How young is too young online? Back when I was working for a public library, doing introductions to the Web for school classes and tours of the library's computer lab, I noticed that most kids younger than third grade were not particularly interested in the Internet. And the few who were had trouble finding their way around online. I looked over many sites targeted at K-3 kids and saw brightly colored, graphics-heavy pages that required a fifth- or sixth-grade reading level. It's fairly clear--to me, at least, and to the few educators with whom I've discussed the issue--that there aren't many folks who possess both a fundamental knowledge of children's developmental stages and the skills to build an effective Web site.
Thus I believe that the vast majority of the Web isn't developmentally appropriate for kids under third grade, and not really appropriate for whole classrooms of kids until fourth grade. I can't prove that, because I have not yet been able to find any studies directly evaluating how easy it is for K-3 kids to use the Web. But all the research I've seen so far--such as the study reported in SLJ ("'Does Not Compute,"' July 2000)--suggests that kids under eight aren't really ready for the Internet.
Nevertheless, there's a tremendous demand right now--from ambitious parents and schools anxious to demonstrate that they are getting kids online young--to locate sites for kids under third grade. In response, school and library groups have assembled collections of Web sites for young kids. One such directory is the California Technology Assistance Project's SCORE site (Schools of California Online Resources for Education), which includes a database of more than 3,000 Web resources supporting California's curriculum standards. Clearly, a tremendous amount of effort went into the database's development. But when I examined some of the Web sites it rated as "'Awesome"' for grades K-3, I was surprised by how developmentally inappropriate some of them were.
Here's an example. The History/Social Sciences section of SCORE strongly recommends "'Kid's Window--Learn About Japan"' (www.jwindow.net/category/kids.html) for first graders. Kid's Window is a links collection, with links along the top of the page that take you to business- and travel-oriented pages for adults. Many of the kids' sites it links to require a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level. It's difficult for me to picture a first-grader using this site without an adult handy.
The SCORE site also recommends "'Native American Indian Art"' (www.kstrom.net/isk/art/art.html) for first-graders. When I looked at this site I was greeted with a report on two recent thefts of Northwest Coast Art too sophisticated for first graders to read. Text-only links like this one followed: "'Definition of Indian, Native, Indigenous Artist; Native American Arts and Crafts Act; Philosophy of Inclusion Here."' Most first-graders could not understand these phrases without adult assistance.
I'm being deliberately naive here; I realize that teachers would be involved as they presented pages like these, either reading the text aloud and pointing to the places the students should click, or simply using the material on these sites as raw material for more conventional instruction.
Using other resource lists intended for younger students, such as the Kids123.com site (www.kids123.com), I was struck by how often plug-in files needed to be checked and new browser windows were launched without warning. Young kids have enough work to do puzzling out the cause-and-effect of URLs and navigation bars. Except for a few excellent sites like Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Library's "'Storyplace"' at www.storyplace.org, there simply isn't much educational content on the Web that kids under third grade can use by themselves, and even Storyplace requires a little adult help for most of its intended users.
Young kids want an instant response when they click on a link. How often have you seen younger students click a link over and over in impatience when the new page hasn't loaded in a nanosecond? In many libraries and schools, there isn't enough bandwidth for that kind of speed. And maybe the things that make the Internet so cool for older users--things like unstructured choice and the ability to hop from context to context--simply aren't developmentally appropriate for kids under third grade.
