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Has the Internet changed the way students conduct research? Yes, and not always for the better, reports to a study released last week by the Pew Research Center, “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World.” According to a survey of more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers, “research” for today’s students means “Googling,” and as a result, doing research “has shifted from a relatively slow process of intellectual curiosity and discovery to a fast-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.”

While teachers in the survey acknowledge the benefits of the web for students—great depth and breadth of information, material presented in engaging multimedia formats, and the opportunity to become self-directed and self-reliant researchers—many of them express concern that easily-distracted students with short attention spans are not developing the skills required to do deep, original research.

From the report: “Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a ‘mostly positive’ impact on their students’ research work. At the same time, 76% of teachers surveyed ‘strongly agree’ with the assertion that internet search engines have conditioned students to expect to be able to find information quickly and easily.”

Here are a few ways teachers, parents and others can help students go beyond Google.

PROMOTE DIGITAL LITERACY — AND TRADITIONAL LITERACY, TOO. In the Pew survey, a majority of teachers agreed that “today’s technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information.” Instruction in digital literacy techniquescan show students how to

determine whether an online reference is legitimate and how to check its claims against other sources. But what students really need to navigate the inaccuracies and flat-out falsehoods so common on the web is a store of knowledge saved on the original hard drive: their own minds. Students must possess abundant factual knowledge in order to evaluate what they encounter on the web, and the best way to acquire content knowledge is still reading nonfiction books.

ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO FACT-FIND FACE-TO-FACE. Young people who’ve grown up in the digital age often have the impression that everything anyone needs to know is located somewhere on the web—so devise assignments that show them it isn’t so. Ask them to find a book in the library that hasn’t yet been scanned by Google Books; require them to consult with a research librarian, who will give them a sense of how many and varied non-digital resources are available; have them conduct an oral history project, collecting stories from living people that can’t be found on a website.

GUIDE THEM TO SEARCH DEEPER.The Internet is not the enemy of careful research; after all, historians, scientists and other experts rely heavily on the web in their work. But they’re using their computers to access in-depth resources like online databases and academic journals—not only Yahoo and Wikipedia. Make sure students know that the results turned up by a search engine are only the topmost layer of information about their subject: from there, they’ve got to do a lot of digging. Google isn’t the end of their search, in other words—it’s just the beginning.

Google has launched a new site called Search Education aimed at educators who want to teach online search strategies.

The site includes lesson plans geared at different levels of expertise — beginner, intermediate and advanced– as well as training videos that walk through different strategies for subjects like using Creative Commons and Google maps.

The lessons cover the following topics:

• Picking the right search terms
• Understanding search results
• Searching for evidence for research tasks
• Narrowing a search to get the best results
• Evaluating the credibility of sources

For each topic, lessons for every level of searcher goes into deep detail, offering background explanations of how search works the way it does, specific examples of search words and their results, and numerous tips. There’s also a short quiz at the end of each lesson.

The lessons are aligned with the Common Core Curriculum Standards and refer to the K-12 College and Career Readiness (CCR) Anchor Standards. According to Google, the lessons are not intended to comprise a whole research unit, but to be integrated into various units as they fit to individual educators’ needs.

Some methods are designed for starting from a specific question or exercise, while others are for created to launch from a topic.

The site also features A Google A Day lessons for daily search exercises, as well as a Lesson Plan Map that shows an overarching guide to how to use the site based on factors like level, knowledge, and skills.

Search results can be presented any number of ways: tables and charts, videos, infographs. We teach students how to develop an understanding of the kinds of information that’s best conveyed with timelines, maps, or diagrams. Using what they know about all the different kinds of content and media, they can apply the same theories of predicting what they might find on their online searches.

Here are some guidelines for asking predictive questions even before they launch their search.

• When I run this search, what do I expect to appear?It’s extremely useful to get in the habit of spending just an instant anticipating what kind of results you expect your search terms to find. When students do not ask this question and search terms bring back unexpected results, they often come away feeling that there’s nothing there. But when students prep themselves by considering what they expect to appear and then skim the first page of results, they’re better prepared to spot any clues indicating that their terms have a meaning they did not foresee. It can be fun to practice this anticipation in class. Try asking students to anticipate what will appear for the searches [who], [the who], and [a who] in turn.
• When I find this answer, what do I expect it to look like? This is where students imagine their perfect source. First, what types of words would this trusted source use? Would a doctor write about a busted arm, or possibly stick with the medical term fracture? From the Common Core standards to those from the American Association of School Librarians, we aim for thoughtful searches that consider the audience and purpose and be able to determine the format and voice that will communicate information most clearly. It stands to reason that if we teach students to look at a bunch of data and decide the best format for sharing it, with practice they should also be able to consider the information they need to find and have an idea of the format it will take when someone else has communicated it for their use. As searchers grow more sophisticated at prediction, they use anticipated language and medium in addition to applying advanced operators, color filtering, and other technical search features to build incisive queries.
• When I click this link, what do I expect I will see? Asking this question also dovetails nicely with skimming the first screen or page of results. Actually seeing results and considering what you can determine about the page behind each can be helpful, as when a middle-schooler I knew was looking for information on what life was like in Colonial times, and came up with results like these:

Not just blindly clicking, but predicting what each page would hold increased his efficiency tremendously.

Have a question for The Savvy Searcher? Contact Tasha on Google+ or at tbm [at] google [dot] com and check out the Search Education Team’s resources. Read more from The Savvy Searcher.

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The Internet has made researching subjects deceptively effortless for students — or so it may seem to them at first. Truth is, students who haven’t been taught the skills to conduct good research will invariably come up short.

That’s part of the argument made by Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs in The Atlantic, who says the ease of search and user interface of fee-based databases have failed to keep up with those of free search engines. In combination with the well-documented gaps in students’ search skills, he suggests that this creates a perfect storm for the abandonment of scholarly databases in favor of search engines. He concludes: “Maybe our greater emphasis shouldn’t be on training users to work with bad search tools, but to improve the search tools.”

His article is responding to a larger, ongoing conversation about whether the ubiquity of Web search is good or bad for serious research. The false dichotomy short-circuits the real question: “What do students really need to know about online search to do it well?” As long as we’re not talking about this question, we’re essentially ignoring the subtleties of Web search rather than teaching students how to do it expertly. So it’s not surprising that they don’t know how to come up with quality results. Regardless of the vehicle–fee databases or free search engines–we owe it to our students to teach them to search well.

So what are the hallmarks of a good online search education?

SKILL-BUILDING CURRICULUM. Search competency is a form of literacy, like learning a language or subject. Like any literacy, it requires having discrete skills as well as accumulating experience in how and when to use them. But this kind of intuition can’t be taught in a day or even in a unit – it has to be built up through exercise and with the guidance of instructors while students take on researching challenges. For example, during one search session, teachers can ask students to reflect on why they chose to click on one link over another. Another time, when using the Web together as a class, teachers can demonstrate how to look for a definition of an unfamiliar word. Thinking aloud when you search helps, as well.

A THOROUGH, MULTI-STEP APPROACH. Research is not a one-step process. It has distinct phases, each with its own requirements. The first stage is inquiry, the free exploration of a broad topic to discover an interesting avenue for further research, based on the student’s curiosity. Web search, with its rich cross-linking and the simplicity of renewing a search with a single click, is ideally suited to this first open-ended stage. When students move on to a literature review, they seek the key points of authority on their topic, and pursue and identify the range of theories and perspectives on their subject. Bibliographies, blog posts, and various traditional and new sources help here. Finally, with evidence-gathering, students look for both primary- and secondary-source materials that build the evidence for new conclusions. The Web actually makes access to many –

but not all — types of primary sources substantially easier than it’s been in the past, and knowing which are available online and which must be sought in other collections is critical to students’ success. For example, a high school student studying Mohandas Gandhi may do background reading in Wikipedia and discover that Gandhi’s worldview was influenced by Leo Tolstoy; use scholarly secondary sources to identify key analyses of their acquaintance; and then delve into online or print books to read their actual correspondence to draw an independent conclusion. At each step of the way, what the Web has to offer changes subtly.

TOOLS FOR UNDERSTANDING SOURCES. Some educators take on this difficult topic, but it’s often framed as a simple black-and-white approach: “These types of sources are good. These types of sources are bad.” Such lessons often reject newer formats, such as blogs and wikis, and privilege older formats, such as books and newspaper articles. In truth, there are good and bad specimens of each, and each has its appropriate uses. What students need to be competent at is identifying the kind of source they’re finding, decoding what types of evidence it can appropriately provide, and making an educated choice about whether it matches their task.

DEVELOPING THE SKILLS TO PREDICT, ASSESS, PROBLEM-SOLVE, AND ITERATE. It’s important for students to ask themselves early on in their search, “When I type in these words, what do I expect to see in my results?” and then evaluate whether the results that appear match those expectations. Identifying problems or patterns in results is one of the most important skills educators can help students develop, along with evaluating credibility. When students understand that doing research requires more than a single search and a single result, they learn to leverage the information they find to construct tighter or deeper searches. Say a student learns that workers coming from other countries may send some of their earnings back to family members. An empowered searcher may look for information on [immigrants send money home], and notice that the term remittances appears in many results. An unskilled searcher would skip over words he doesn’t recognize know, but the educated student can confirm the definition of remittance, then do another search, [remittances immigrants], which brings back more scholarly results.

TECHNICAL SKILLS FOR ADVANCED SEARCH. Knowing what tools and filters are available and how they work allows students to find what they seek, such as searching by color, domain, filetype, or date. Innovations in technology also provide opportunities to visualize data in new ways. But most fundamentally, good researchers remember that it takes a variety of sources to carry out scholarly research. They have the technical skills to access Web pages, but also books, journal articles, and people as they move through their research process.

Centuries ago, the teacher Socrates famously argued against the idea that the written word could be used to transmit knowledge. This has been disproved over the years, as authors have developed conventions for communicating through the written word and educators have effectively taught students to extract that knowledge and make it their own. To prepare our students for the future, it’s time for another such transition in the way we educate. When we don’t teach students how to manage their online research effectively, we create a self-perpetuating cycle of poor-quality results. To break that cycle, educators can engage students in an ongoing conversation about how to carry out excellent research online. In the long term, students with stronger critical thinking skills will be more effective at school, and in their lives.

What do you think it is most important for students to know about online research? Please share in the comments section below.

Have a question for The Savvy Searcher? Contact Tasha and check out the Search Education Team’s resources. Read more from The Savvy Searcher.

Flickr: Richard Morton

By Tasha Bergson-Michelson

At its heart, clever searching lies at the intersection of critical thinking, imagination, and the savvy use of technical tools. Google Search Educator Tasha Bergson-Michelson begins a series of guest posts about innovative ways to approach finding information and the problems we can solve when we bring together technology, creativity, and education.

It’s right before bedtime on Sunday night, and your child just announced that she has a report due in the morning about heroes. Excited by the Super Bowl, she wants to write about teamwork among her personal heroes, the New England Patriots. Off she goes to Google to find some inspirational pictures of the Patriots in action.

When searching for the New England Patriots, you get a variety of images–but many of them logos, or fan created photo montages on a background of the team colors. If you actually want a screen full of pictures of people playing the game, what are your options?

Looking at this first screen of results, considering what to do next, a savvy searcher asks what pictures of people actually playing football would all have in common.

One picture above immediately catches the eye: the green photo in the third row. You can tell that it is a picture of a game because of the grass on the field. In fact, most action shots in a game should have a background of turf. So, what if there was a way to tell Google to deliver only images with grassy backgrounds?

Take a look at the left-hand side of the screen. Near the bottom, there is a series of colored boxes. These are filters that allow you to find pictures of a particular color. By clicking on the green box, you can essentially tell Google to return pictures with a lot of grass:

You might be surprised at the scholarly contexts in which color filtering becomes a powerful search tactic. By itself color filtering might seem like a niche feature, but looking at a few practical applications can get your creative juices flowing as you think about problems it might solve for you.

Let’s take another example. Consider an approach one librarian discovered when working with her school’s science teachers. Run an Image Search for tesla coil and you will find:

But say that what you really want is a diagram of how a tesla coil works. What is a common factor of such diagrams? In looking carefully at the images above, you may notice that most are dark, with bright, purple arcs. Diagrams, on the other hand, tend to have mostly black writing on a white background. So, click on the white color filter:

Now, all of a sudden, your results are primarily diagrams and other technical details. Voila!

These searches are examples of a broader strategy called predictive search, in which you winnow down to your best results by anticipating their common factors. Google search allows you to specify common factors by color or terms, but also by characteristics like language, medium, or geographical or chronological features, in order to narrow down to exactly what you need. Once you see how you can think creatively about the defining characteristics of the information you want, you can become truly powerful at finding what you need.

Future posts will explore unexpected applications of everyday Google tools to solve problems even faster and more effectively.

One final example of how color filtering can improve both academic research and daily life: Have you ever read a book, and later remembered the subject and something about the cover, but not the title itself? For example, say you were wondering, “What was that book about Lewis and Clark I looked at the other day–that red one with the canoe on the cover?”

Simply search for [Lewis Clark book] in Google Images:

And filter for red images:

This method works whether you are trying to identify that full title you forgot to write down for your works cited list, or locating a gift for that special someone, when you can’t remember the title, but have just a general idea of the topic and remember that great shade of red.

Often people think of searching in words, but don’t consider the other elements that they know identify their answers. A little creativity in making use of what you know can find you more than you ever dreamed.

Give it a try! What problem can color filtering solve for you?