Making Research Count

Tom Wexler, a 16-year-old Junior at Springfield Township High School, outside of Philadelphia, went the whole nine yards for his recent project on the future of weather forecasting, filling a two-inch binder with information from various government and university Web sites, books, magazines, catalogs, and the Infotrac and EBSCOhost reference databases. He even called the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and interviewed a local meteorologist. "There are so many more resources," Wexler says. "The only way I remember them is by going to Mrs. Valenza's Web site and accessing them through that." The Web site he's referring to was created by his school librarian, Joyce Valenza, who says her goal is to "spread the gospel of information literacy." And because technology is such an integral part of everyday life, the Internet has become the prime medium for her message (see "One Site Fits All" below).

Springfield's students have been going through a research boot camp of sorts under Valenza's guidance, and, so far, the results have been significant. When it comes to research, Springfield students are learning to handle just about any assignment thrown their way. Topical research papers that involve quick and simple Yahoo! or Google searches have given way to assignments requiring students to unearth primary documents, books, journals, and Web sites—and then organize the information into persuasive theses. Valenza's mission is to teach lifelong research skills with an emphasis on critical thinking.

It all began in 2000, when Valenza concluded that Springfield's kids—850 mostly college-bound students taking advanced placement courses in calculus and biology—had an overinflated view of the viability of online research. Her findings were confirmed in a 10-minute videotape she made based on student interviews. "Books have become obsolete in the library," one freshman told Valenza. "We never go to the bookshelves or tables. It's too much work." Instead, the student said she sits with fellow classmates at the computer "clicking on anything we need without actually having to move." A senior added, "The Internet has so much of the stuff that the library can't offer." When Valenza informed them that 90 percent of the books in the library weren't available on the Web, another student replied, "But you can find something that has the exact same thing on the Web."

The erroneous perceptions were enough to convince Valenza to lobby Principal Joseph Roy to help her formulate an ambitious two-pronged plan. The first part would motivate students to become better researchers. The second part would pose an even greater challenge because of the political implications: to show teachers how their teaching methods and assessments were flawed. Although identifying the problem was easy, finding a solution proved more difficult—after all, it involved unteaching what had long been considered acceptable work. "Many teachers had not been used to looking for analysis in work," Valenza says. "Rubrics had to be changed; checkpoints were set up." And students had to be taught how to use the appropriate resources and to dig deeper.

Getting an "A" on an assignment had more to do with a teacher's expectations, Valenza explains, than whether students put any thought into their assignments. "They were giving us exactly what we were asking for," and they were getting good grades for it, admits Springfield English teacher Michael Wagman. Adds Valenza, "Unless we changed the questions, unless we changed the way teachers graded research, we were going to get the same old stuff over and over again."

In order to carry out her mission, Valenza needed the support of the entire staff. She had expressed frustration to Roy that students would never adhere to her information literacy-based program because, unlike teachers, she wasn't required to grade students. Roy's backing was crucial to getting a green light. Soon after, language arts chairwoman Carol Rohrbach was on board, as was Wagman, drama teacher Marlene Thornton, and technology director Bradley Landis. Before long Valenza had amassed a 15-member advisory team comprised of department chairs and key teachers, all of whom had the same goal: to engage in a schoolwide overhaul of the research process.

The first step was getting teachers to understand and to start implementing inquiry-based research, in which students respond to compelling questions that can't be answered with a simple yes or no. That way, teens are forced to analyze various perspectives and then come to their own conclusions. "A lot of persistence on the part of the teacher is necessary to keep the expectations high, and eventually the level of performance will come up," Wagman adds.

Since the 2000 academic year, the advisory team has focused on creating a common vocabulary for students and teachers, identifying print and online research guides, and integrating information literacy standards into each classroom. All of Springfield's teachers eventually got the message that their students needed to graduate as competent, critical, and ethical users of information. Then, just as planned, students started handing in the well-thought-out thesis projects that were expected of them. The new expectations even took care of the school's growing plagiarism problem. "A lot of teachers were coming to me, tearing their hair out about the level of plagiarism that was going on," says Valenza, who easily demonstrated the difficulty of copying once students had to solve problems they devised on their own.

In one assignment, for example, students were asked to play the role of representatives of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and to allocate foreign aid to sub-Saharan African countries. Before making a recommendation, however, students had to develop a knowledge base about each country's economic, political, and social situation. "Rather than just reporting on your country, you now had to make a value judgment, an assessment based on demographics," says Wagman.

Students held a mock Middle East peace conference for another assignment, playing the roles of Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and other important regional figures. Students had to read online back issues of the Palestine Times and the Jerusalem Post to research each side's stance, including the influences of the intifada and the 1993 Oslo Accords. "We led them to English translations of foreign newspapers, and they had to read background magazine and newspaper articles that were historical," Valenza says. "It elevated the level of learning dramatically."

Assignments like these don't have to be huge projects, the advisory group says; they can be short essays, as long as more thinking is involved. Some new assignments don't even require paper, just outlines of good annotated bibliographies or student-created pathfinders, which outline the resources used in a project. Valenza is adamant that students familiarize themselves with print resources. Books and magazines, she says, are particularly useful when students research materials prior to 1980 because they're absent from many databases. "There's a big black hole in [online] information between 1980 and 1996, but the older magazine articles have it," she adds. " When we introduce that to students as an alternative, they're freaked out by the idea that that stuff exists and that you can actually get to it."

Another critical ingredient to the program is that the entire Springfield School District has agreed to include inquiry-based research and information-literacy standards in elementary and middle schools. Rohrbach devotes part of her job as Springfield's language arts chairwoman to developing similar standards for younger students so that this kind of research will be a natural evolution for them when they reach high school.

In a preemptive strike, Valenza, who teaches with Wagman at Philadelphia's Drexel University's College of Library and Information Science, also propagates her message to incoming educators. She tells prospective teachers and librarians that students are either "sponges," absorbing information passively, or "miners," actively searching for the gems of correct and complete information. Being a miner requires students to evaluate material critically, to "talk back to the writer even when he is not present," and come to informed conclusions. "Not all information was created equal," Wagman says. "Just because it's in print or because it's on television doesn't make it necessarily accurate."

Ideally, all schools should adapt Springfield's approach to learning, but identifying exact problems aren't always easy. Even Springfield's advisory team admits that their overhaul was a direct result of trying to keep up with technology. "[The Internet] made students' lack of enthusiasm for scholarship more obvious," Valenza says. Wexler, the junior who recently completed a project on weather forecasting, is an example of how a student can benefit from the curriculum changes. "You just don't know the amount of information devoted to something unless you dive into it," says Wexler, who enjoys being around the school library so much that he works part time in its technology department. "What makes it such a great place, is everybody loves it." Open three evenings a week, there can be up to 30 students in the library conducting research on any given night. And during normal school hours, there are as many as five classes there working on projects.

Valenza and her colleagues say they've made a definite difference at Springfield High. The quality of student work in the senior global studies project, for instance, has gradually improved over the last three semesters. "We're not there yet, and we don't know when we'll get there," Valenza says. "But we're getting there, and [the students] know we're on to them."

So far, Valenza's approach to learning seems to be working.

"Joyce has a steel fist in a padded glove," Landis says. "So she can deliver a really high-powered question in a nice way."