What Students Know Before They Go Online Matters
Researcher says librarians still know more about how to find information online than kids
Staff -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2000
Middle-school and high-school students who know about a subject beforehand are best able to use a Web site on that topic to answer questions, a new study has found. On the other hand, students who don't know a subject beforehand tend to skim through text and miss important information. "Kids skip over information when they skim sites," says Martha Peet, now a Web researcher for the Texas Center for Educational Technology. "Sometimes the answer to a question was staring them in the face, and they didn't see it."
'Sometimes the answer to a question was staring [the kids] in the face, and they didn't see it.'
Researcher Martha Peel
Peet and a team of researchers at the University of North Texas (UNT) recently published results of a study in which they tested one group of 12-year-olds and another of 16-year-olds in a UNT computer lab. The students, all experienced Web users, were shown two commercial Web sites--the Disney site at www.disney.com and the Edmunds automotive buying site at www.edmunds.com--and asked a series of questions about information on the sites. Some were simple factual questions, like "What is the manufacturer's suggested retail price for the footwell lighting option on a 1999 Porsche 911 Carrera?" Others were more complex, such as "How much more would you have to pay for a one-day/one-park adult pass to Walt Disney World than for a one-day adult pass to Disneyland?"
The researchers--Terry Sullivan, Cathleen Norris, and Peet from UNT and Elliot Soloway from the University of Michigan--found that students did best on answering questions when they knew a lot about a subject--Disney movies, for instance--beforehand. They also found that flashy graphics like animations have no effect on kids' abilities to find answers on a Web site. In fact, young people would frequently scroll animations off the screen as soon as possible so they could search without distractions.
Peet says that students need to learn to read the text on Web sites more carefully. Librarians, she says, should not feel cowed by the bravado many students display around the Net. "Librarians assume kids know more than they really do about finding answers online," she says, "but librarians usually know more about how to find information." For a description of the study, visit www.pantos.org/ts/papers/wkutw.--Walter Minkel
