Teaching Students How to Verify and Evaluate Information

Research skills, herein defined as the students’ ability to access, verify, evaluate, and use information, constitute one of the most important 21st century skills that students must acquire in order to survive in the information age. They are important because they enable students to locate the information that they need in order to engage in problem-solving tasks successfully in a world characterized by superabundance of ever-changing knowledge (Wagner, 2008).

Unfortunately, many students lack these important skills. For instance, the Project Information Literacy Report, which was conducted by an institution that focuses on gathering data about young adults and their research habits, revealed that 84 percent of students experience difficulty where research is concerned (Chapman, 2010). According to Chapman (2010), the report showed that students feel overwhelmed by superabundance of information, and have the tendency to look for the correct answer rather than evaluate information for themselves.

It is for this reason that I have decided to look for a strategy with which I could help my students acquire these important skills. This strategy seeks to address the need to teach students how to gather and verify information.

In his Harvard Educational Review article, High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies With and Despite Wikipedia, Houman Harouni (2009), recounted his experience teaching his eleventh grade class. He noted the tendency among them to present reports that contained too many concise but disconnected details, rely on one source, fail to over-emphasize some points, and mistake opinion for fact. Later, he found out that his students were using the Wikipedia.

Realizing the failure of the strategies that he had employed in teaching students research skills, Harouni (2009) said he decided to look for alternative ways with which students could acquire the skills needed to conduct research. Prior to this, he had focused on the quality of the students’ final outputs, and allowed the research process to remain outside the classroom.

This does not mean that he did not bother at all to guide his students through the process of research. In fact, Harouni  (2009) maintained he made it a point to give his students a series of rules to follow in conducting research. These rules were framed in the form of questions to guide students in their examination of documents. However, Harouni noticed that students tended to apply these rules in a purely mechanical manner without much critical thinking going into the process. Moreover, where complex documents were concerned, the manner with which students applied these principles was superficial (Harouni, 2009). He identified the reason for the failure of this approach: it assumed that students possessed a huge research background and knowledge of the world.

In devising a strategy with which to teach students research skills, therefore, he tried to compensate for this lack. Harouni (2009) said he figured out that the students must begin their inquiry with issues about which they were familiar. He believed it would put his students in a position where they could weigh the different issues surrounding the topic in question . This idea echoes the principle that instruction must always take into account and build on the students’ prior learning in order to succeed (National Research Council, 2005).

Harouni (2009) also said that he realized the  students must be given ample opportunity to apply the learning they could derive from analysis of the reliability of sources to a reflection of their own practices as far as sharing of knowledge is concerned. He thought this would deepen the students’ understanding of the dynamics of text production because they are applying such understanding in a more personal context.

Utilizing the aforementioned principles, Harouni (2009) said he set about the task of teaching research skills to his students. He met his students in the computer room, asked them to pair off, and told them to find an article in Wikipedia that they were most familiar about. He then asked each pair to read for statements in the article they were reading that they found dubious. A few minutes later, he asked one of the students to share the article she had been reading with the class and the statement in it whose correctness she found dubious. The subsequent sharing of experience elicited a lively discussion among the students. Questions veered from the correctness of their classmate’s distrust of a statement in her chosen Wikipedia article, to the reliability and authority of the Wikipedia article itself (Harouni, 2009).

Later during the same session, Harouni (2009) reports that he told the students that the small numbers found in the text of the Wikipedia articles they were reading correspond to the references found at the bottom part of the articles. This generated further curiosity in the class, with one student expressing doubt on the motive of the original source of the information supposed to be dubious, while another student volunteered to look further for a particular website to where he could verify the accuracy of the data (Harouni, 2009).

The session continued with students being asked to do another similar task (Harouni, 2009). Harouni (2009) told his eleventh grade class to return to the articles. This time, he asked his students to read for statements they found accurate but might be doubted by other people. The purpose of this second activity was to give the students an opportunity to explore further the concept of controversy, and go beyond its personal aspect. For the homework, Harouni asked his eleventh grade class to retrace the steps they had taken during the class and write a reflection on its results.

After the class, Harouni (2009) described how he noted the ability of the students to address complex issues surrounding the reliability of a particular source and attributed it to the fact that the students were dealing with topics that they were familiar with. He believed that this familiarity enabled students to conduct analyses that were more informed and critical. He also observed that the results of the strategy that he employed greatly surpassed those of the traditional one where students are simply asked to follow specific rules in determining the reliability of sources.

I think the strategy employed by Harouni (2009) in teaching research skills to his eleventh grade students may be—and should be–adopted and modified for use in local setting. I myself have an experience similar to that of Harouni. In one of my social studies class, I asked my students to research on the background of people that had made important contributions to the field of economics. One of my students, whom I thought to be more percipient than many of her classmates, shared the results of her research. She proudly read her outputs and halfway through it, I was astonished. She read through—albeit haltingly, and with observable uneasiness–a passage which was obscene and therefore obviously vandalized by someone. It was obvious that my student had misgivings about the information she was reading, but she could not bring herself to doubt the reliability of her source. She used Wikipedia.

Such scenario illustrates the tendency among many social studies students to treat sources uncritically to the detriment of the quality of their research outputs. This calls for the integration of instruction on how to verify and evaluate information from sources. One way to do this is through adoption and adaption of the strategy used by Harouni in teaching his eleventh-grade class.

References:

Chapman, P. (2010). Students lack basic research skills, study finds. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-lack-basic-research-skills-study-finds/28112.

National Research Council. (2005). How students learn: History in the classroom. Committee on how people learn, A targeted report for teachers, M.S. Donovan and J.D. Bransford (Eds.). Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Wagner, T. (2008). Rigor redefined. Retrieved from http://www.tonywagner.com/resources/rigor-redefined.

Harouni, H. (2009). High school research and critical literacy: Social studies with and despite Wikipedia. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 473-494.