The Role of Research in the Digital Age
We all know that the Internet has led to an explosion of available
information. When students search for information about a topic, they
are met with a plethora of articles, from both credible and
non-credible resources. The skill of research has always been considered
to be a pillar of the social studies discipline, though the nature of
research itself has been rapidly changing as the Internet develops and
our society becomes less dependant on paper-bound books. As social
studies teachers, it is our job to be cognizant of how these changes
are having an impact on our discipline.
The Encyclopedia
Gone
are the days of consulting the ever-trustworthy Encyclopedia
Britannica; there used to be an inherent trust we could have that the
information we found was the most relevant to our query, was presented
in a (relatively) unbiased way, and was accurate. Now, finding the
information is only a small fraction of the challenge of research.
Students must now discern if the source they found contains accurate,
factual, and documented information. Once they have done that, they
must determine what the purpose of their source is, and whether or not
it is presenting the information in a significantly skewed manner. This
skill set is commonly found as part of university-level history
curriculum, but now students as young as 4th grade need to begin
developing this proficiency.
The Value of a Website
After receiving too many research papers that relied solely on
Wikipedia, we realized that these skills needed to be explicitly
taught, and that they needed to be developed in our social studies
class. When looking for previously published curricula about Internet
skills, we found Common Sense Media’s Test Before You Trust materials,
which were exactly what we were looking for. They guide students
through asking tough questions about each source: Is the bias readily
apparent? Who paid for the website? How many sources are cited for
their information? Thanks to this material, students can at least ask
the right questions about the online source.
In order to have the skills to evaluate a source found on the
Internet, we need to not only teach tools to do this –like those found
in Common Sense Media’s Test Before You Trust materials– but we need to
teach how to evaluate the perspective of the sources students read,
and to students even younger than before. In other words: we need to
teach about bias.
Perspective
Obviously, before the advent of the Internet, historians wrote from
particular perspectives. The perspective of the author of a primary
source was written from the perspective of personal experience. The
letters of Abigail Adams reflect her perspective on politics, women’s
rights, and slavery in a different way from the writings of Thomas
Jefferson. Throughout history, historians have looked at events
through the lens of their own biases– their writings are colored by
their politics, culture, and experience. Also, the availability of
certain information to those historians limited what they could and
couldn’t write about. It wasn’t as often though, when we were in
middle school, that students encountered a secondary source or tertiary
source beyond the encyclopedia–so teaching about bias wasn’t as
necessary.
Instead now, secondary and tertiary sources on the Internet can be
found by anyone and written by anyone–evaluating the bias of the source
plays an important part in evaluating whether the site is useful.
Since the Internet is not peer reviewed like academic journals,
students are going to have to do the evaluation themselves. We teach
our history students to evaluate bias by reading two different sources
writing from different perspectives on the same historical event.
Students find the details in the text that help shed light on what a
source’s perspective is. Students find telling adjectives, figure out
what information is included, what is omitted. Everything is data.
Analysis and Evaluation in Social Studies Research
The tools used for detecting the bias of a source, and the critical
thinking skills they require, must become part of social studies
curriculum, and earlier now than ever before. However, critical
thinking skills of evaluation and analysis that are required to detect
bias aren’t necessarily developed until students reach the formative
operations stage described by Piaget. While the seeds of perspective
analysis need to be planted early, some students may not yet be
developmentally ready for learning how to discern on their own. To
assist them, there are tools to help sort through the vast amount of
resources available. For example, search engines like SweetSearch only
display results appropriate for students (though that doesn’t mean the
sites they find are without bias).
Today, people are not necessarily considered knowledgeable based on
how much information they know, but by how much facility they have with
that information. As teachers in the discipline of history we have to
own the idea that teaching students how to analyze and evaluate the
information they find is more important than
gathering that information together in one place. We ask our students
to research, but it is not simply about finding information anymore.
Students will need to sift through multiple perspectives on the
Internet, and ultimately decide which perspectives are valuable and
useful for their purpose. As social studies teachers, we have to show
them HOW to research.
