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Dan: Welcome to the Full Circle Resource Kit podcast.  Today we are sitting down with Dr. David Barr to explore some practical ways that teachers can assist students to find better keywords during an online search.  David began researching this field more than 10 years ago and he was the original founder of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project.  So we asked him to share some of his insights with us.

How have you tackled the barriers that searchers face when they are going online?

David: Well, the barriers have actually changed over time.  In the early days people didn’t understand exactly what the Internet was, and had all sorts of fears – some of which remain – about the kind of information that was there.  But for the most part it was just an incredible lack of understanding of what the possibilities were and what was out there.

To tell you the truth, I think the barriers today have less to do with hardware and software than with mindware.  That is, most people – students in particular who are familiar with the Internet and have used it – make a whole series of assumptions that currently represent the greatest barrier, in my view, to their success. 

The first thing that I notice when I watch students is that they’ve come to believe that whatever the search engine gives them is indeed what they were looking for and is going to be high quality.  In other words, the number one hit they assume is what they were looking for and that it is good.  You don’t have to walk far to find students – you can ask them that question and they’ll say, “Oh, I always find what I’m looking for ” or “I always find good stuff.”  Until you look over their shoulder and ask, “Well, what were you looking for?”  And discover that, in fact, it isn’t always that way.  They make some assumptions like that.

Dan: So, where should teachers spend their time if they have, say, a one hour session with students to help them search better?

David: One way we found useful is to think about searching with keywords as a two-part task.  The first part is to enter keywords that make sure that your document is going to be retrieved.  So, make sure that you’ve got the document.  But then if you are looking for something very specific about World War II – the role of women nurses in the Pacific in World War II – which is an interesting topic, you need to think, “Now how am I going to get that document to the top?”  Because there are millions of documents about war.  So, first you’ve got to figure out which terms to use about, that describe the world war.  Secondly, which term are you going to use for ‘nurses’?  Is it going to be ‘nurses’ or ‘nurse’, ‘medical personnel’, and is it in the Pacific, is it somewhere specific there?

So, a challenge that helps students get that document to the top of the list is something that we found that students respond to pretty positively.  And a practical way to go about doing that – it’s easy to say, difficult to do, a tactic that has worked for us – is to give students a document that is on the general topic that doesn’t have the URL.  So you need to print this out or give them the document in some way that doesn’t have the URL and doesn’t have the title, it’s just the text of that document.  And say, “OK, we got this document off the Internet.  Your job is to make this the number one hit in your search results.  So, I’m giving you the text.”

It’s still an interesting challenge to say, “What will bring that to the top of the list?”  Some students will take the easy route and they’ll put something, you know five words in quotation marks, and it gets it to the top of the list.  We know they know how to use quotes then.  But if they don’t, they have to figure out what’s going to get that to the top of the list.  And once they start to recognize what does that, then it’s a good jumping off point to talk about keywords.

You can have several documents.  One has ‘World War II’ and one has ‘the second World War’, and one has ‘nurses’, and one has ‘medical personnel.’ And if you give them five documents on the topic and demonstrate that it takes a different query for each to retrieve each one of those five documents – they’ve learned something about how to use keywords and also about how search engines work.  Because they will try other things that won’t get those documents.  And oftentimes they’ll try the things they’ve tried before.  If they don’t work, that’s a learning moment.

So understanding that notion that “You don’t always get the word the first time” and that as someone said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try a synonym” is still one of the best rules around. And it requires two things: it requires students to understand that they need to do that, to be patient enough to look for other words that might apply.

Dan: I haven’t heard you say yet that we sit down with students and show them the features of a browser.  I mean, I’m hearing you talking about giving students problems to try to solve as they are searching online.  Is this the way forward as we look at the amount of time we have in a school day to work with students if they are going to do a research project?  I mean, they wanna find an answer quickly.

David: Another thing we’ve learned is that you can teach students tactics until you are blue in the face.  And, if they don’t understand the fundamentals, the strategies that really work well, they are not going to be a successful as they can and should be.  Starting with the fundamentals is where we start most everywhere with every subject we teach.  What are the really fundamental concepts there?  So, while it is easy and tempting to focus on the things – browsers and buttons and those sorts of things – our experience with assessment suggests to us that you certainly need to know whether they understand the fundamentals or not.

I mean you can teach – you mentioned a problem-based approach – you can teach people to add, subtract, multiply and divide forever.  If you don’t ever give them a mathematical problem, they never learn math, they just learn arithmetic.  So, if we teach them tactics of searching, they are going to learn a lot about technology, but not much about information and technology.  I work with my grandchildren, who are 5, 7, and 9 and let me tell you, if I don’t make it interesting and if I don’t make it challenging, I don’t keep them very long.  They don’t, they aren’t going to listen to me talk a lot.  But they will respond to those kind of challenges.  They will respond to problems that we solve.  So, I think every generation responds that way and I think that problem based approach is the very best way to go about doing that.

Dan : Well, thank you for spending this time with us to share your insights and we will look forward to some more of the results that are coming out of the research that is being done as part of this project.  And thank you for kicking it off, more than 10 years ago, to get us to where we are now, which has been a wonderful journey for those of us who have been involved with it in various ways.

David:It’s been a great journey for me and mainly because of the people I have worked with.  I might take just enough credit to say ‘I kicked it off’ but what kept it going were all the other people who have been involved in this project.  So, it has been a pleasure for me.

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Dan:  This is a production of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at the Illinois Math and Science Academy.