Articles From the Expanded Academic Index
Communications of the ACM, May 1997 v40 n5 p11(6)
Does the Internet support student inquiry? Don't ask. Elliot Soloway; Raven
Wallace.
Abstract: The National Research Council and the American Assn for the Advancement
of Science claim that Internet-based information
gathering is not educationally productive for students. Although the Internet
provides a way learning through interactive means, it contains
collections that are not comprehensive and systematic. More effective technology
in education is should be developed to address the scarcity of
teachers in the classrooms.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Association for Computing Machinery Inc. National
organizations, such as the National Research Council and
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, are unified in
their call for a new pedagogy, a Deweyian educational framework,
where students engage in serious inquiry, asking and exploring authentic,
worthwhile, and challenging questions.
"Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is
the central strategy for teaching science." (National Research Council,
National Science Education Standards, 1996, p. 31)
Such inquiry requires access to serious information resources.
"Inquiry is a multifaceted activity that involves making observations;
posing questions; examining books and other sources of information to see
what is already known; planning investigations; reviewing what is already
known in light of experimental evidence; using tools to gather,
analyze, and interpret data; proposing answers, explanations, and predictions;
and communicating the results. Inquiry requires identification of
assumptions, use of critical and logical thinking, and consideration of
alternative explanations." (Ibid, p. 31)
But classrooms are information-poor environments. Thirty copies of the
same, outdated book is not good enough, and the yearly $200 available
to the school's library for all the subjects for new acquisitions is not
going to do it either. And, in these times of cutbacks, we can't expect
the
public library to be particularly responsive. Where else are kids going
to get the information resources they need but from the Web?
That said, the disquieting theme we explore here is this: Given the current
tools, organization, and content on the Web, having kids productively
search the Web in pursuit of serious questions is a hard task.
Unless teachers and students (and parents and administrators) are willing
to invest healthy doses of time, effort, and good humor, searching the
Web may well not be an educationally productive activity.
Now, we are not saying it's a bad idea to have students use Web resources
in school; there are many Web sites that are educationally rewarding.
Rather, we are concerned with what students get out of searching the Web
for resources. This concern is based on our efforts, over the past
year, with upwards of 1,000 students in their early teens (Figure 1), 30
teachers and media specialists, in five Ann Arbor, Mich., middle and
high schools in designing and implementing inquiry-based curriculum units
(www.umich.edu/~aaps). In what follows, we identify a set of
issues we have observed make the educational impact of Web-based inquiry
less than what it could be.
[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The World-Wide Wait
Activities successful at 8 AM can be failures at 2 PM as the net gets busier
and slower each passing hour. An example: Last February, 6th
graders--12-year-olds--were on the net during each of seven periods, beginning
at 7:45 AM and going through to 3:15. They were exploring
driving questions of their own invention under the theme "natural disasters."
What does it feel like to be in an earthquake? Will we ever have a
big earthquake in Michigan? How are hurricanes predicted?
Three days were allotted for online searching. During the first few periods,
it was smooth sailing. Students were able to visit just about every
site they tried and had few instances of download times longer than 30
seconds. But by seventh hour--after the west coast came online--there
were many instances of "connection refused," Netscape and system crashes,
and long waits (30 seconds to 3 minutes) for pages to download.
Needless to say, students in the later periods were much less prepared
for their oral class presentation on their findings; they hardly had any
findings!
In effect, classes later in the day were out of sync with classes earlier
in the day; teachers are reluctant to engage in activities that benefit
only
some of the kids and cause class management problems. And the students
are just about to bounce off the walls: picture 11- and 12-year-olds
sitting patiently in front of the monitor while one page appears, bit-by-bit,
minute-by-minute.
Navigating Is Too Strong a Word
The ease with which students and teachers learn to use Web browsers is
truly astounding. It's reminiscent of the early GUI days and such
programs as MacPaint that enabled just plain folks to instantly create
drawings. No manual was needed; just point-and-click and the technology
disappeared and activity flowed forth.
But using a browser is not the same as "productively navigating the Web."
Even the nonlinear, videogame generation becomes quickly frustrated
and stymied.
Going nowhere. In a recent class, 12-year-old students became excited about
a page they found that dealt with birthstones. But, they were
interrupted at the end of class, and wasted the better part of the next
two days trying to find the site again. They knew it was there, but could
not
get to it.
Yes, the students should have created a bookmark. That's easy to say in
hindsight. But oftentimes one realizes a site is important only after
visiting other sites. And alas, no real help from the history trail in
Netscape Navigator; it gets erased when one backtracks.
Going in circles. A student was looking for information on sapphires and
why they are blue. She returned repeatedly to the same page from
different hot lists which identified it in different ways. She became very
confused about "why everyone says exactly the same thing" and never
realized that she was going in circles.
Going everywhere. As moving from site to site is as simple as point-and-click,
it's easy to get so overwhelmed with information and sites visited
that it's hard to remember where you've been or where you're going. When
this happens, students often follow the path of least resistance--they
rewrite their question to fit some answer they happen to have found.
We need to take our metaphors seriously, and develop all manner of compasses
for Web navigation.
Keyword Searching Doesn't Work Anymore
In the early days of the Web, these are problems we found with searching:
* A science student looking for information about lava gets hundreds of
hits about lava lamps. A student searches for "tornado" and is very
puzzled when the first page he goes to, ranked highly by the search engine,
is about a major league baseball pitcher named Hideo Nomo (aka,
Tornado Boy).
* A student searches for "volcanoes, water life" with an implicit OR, and
gets 14,000 hits; the student selects another option under the search
line, and searches for "volcanoes, water life" with an implicit AND, getting
zero hits.
And now a new problem has been added: because of the explosive growth in
the sheer number of Web pages, students spend their precious time
"improving results," desperately trying to whittle down their returned
hit lists from literally hundreds of thousands to just hundreds. This,
of
course, is still not good enough to deal with in a 50-minute period.
After telling the teacher what she wanted to hear, one student put it succinctly:
"The Internet was a good experience. I think a lot of people got
very frustrated with errors, too many topics, and too little topics.
"It would also be better if it kept track of what searches work and what
ones don't."--Mike, age 12, 2/11/96
Even if we could teach mere mortals to formulate Boolean queries, they
don't seem to help all that much. It used to be that one used the Alta
Vista search engine because it had the most thorough index of the Web,
and returned all manner of hits; now that feature is a bug. Frankly, in
our searching, we have been reduced to looking for what the librarians
call "pathfinders"--hot lists of hits that others have created by investing
the hours searching and searching.
In the fine tradition of libraries, Yahoo employs humans to catalog and
assign descriptions to Web sites. This cataloging effort makes it easier
for
patrons to search and find the items they want. But consider these numbers:
* Print Media. There are approximately 50,000 librarians and staff doing
original and copy cataloging of the 230,000 new books per year,
12,000 new serials per year, dealing with the thousands of serials that
go out of print each year, and so forth. Librarians are, by and large,
paid
for out of public funds.
* Web. We have seen arguments that the Web doubles in size, in pages, every
six months; at the end of 1996, the Web is estimated to have
about 50 million pages. The number of full-time, Web site catalogers can't
possibly be anywhere near 50,000; the government is not in the
business of paying web site catalogers. The implication is even if we turn
every welfare recipient in the world into a Web cataloger, there is no
way that human cataloging of sites will be an effective procedure.
That said, unless a search engine can guarantee that within the first 10
returned hits at least half are useful/relevant/productive, we are not
going
to find many teachers willing to spend precious class time having their
students search the Web. This is truly a dilemma.
The Web is Not a Library
A library contains comprehensive collections of information resources.
While the Web contains collections, there is no guarantee of
comprehensiveness, of systematically covering the human record. A library
is a purposely and purposefully constructed organization; but, by
design, the same cannot be said of the Web.
A team of two 12-year-old students were investigating their question, "How
long does it take for the water cycle?" While they found various
Web pages on the water cycle, in three, 50-minute class periods they could
not find anything that spoke about the timing of the water cycle.
During the last period of the inquiry unit, these students went to the
school's library. Lo and behold, they immediately found two books that
helped them answer their question.
The lack of systematicity means that the Web cannot be the sole source
for students engaging in serious inquiry. Searching the public libraries
must be an integral part of student's research.
Do You Want Your Child To See This?
Since searching the Web is more like stumbling than navigating, there is
a real issue of inadvertently coming across inappropriate material. Last
year this concern was overblown; this year, with the explosion of Web pages,
it is, sad to say, not. For instance:
* A student doing a unit on
* rocks and minerals recently searched for "rocks" with WebCrawler and
was confronted with a site called "SexRocks" as the fourth hit in a list
of thousands of sites.
* On the same day, another student searched for "lapis" and half of the
first 20 hits referred to the Lapis Lounge, an adult erotic site.
Although these students did not visit the pages, even the page summaries
were not the kind of thing most parents want their 14-year-old reading.
Worse yet, in some instances, the nature of the site was not apparent from
the summary. It is one thing for kids to actively search for these sorts
of sites; some do, and our teachers work with these students to better
understand the implications of their actions. However, for students to
be
able to inadvertently stumble on such materials during class time is simply
unacceptable.
Go to your favorite search engine and type in "stormfront." Think you'll
get information on weather? Wrong. That happens to be the site for
White Nationalist Web Resources (Figure 2). Do you want your child confronted
with Nazi clip art or the hate quote of the week? Before buying
into a Web site filtering program, consider this: your child's school librarian
most likely does not practice book censorship; in fact, a
commitment not to is central to the American Library Association's principles
of library service. Is Web site censoring, then, via filtering--a
euphemism if there ever was one--the right way to go?
[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A Myth: Answers Can Be Found
We can envision a time in the not-too-distant future when there will be
higher and predictable bandwidth, WebCompasses, and focused
collections of age-appropriate materials on the Web. While these are necessary
conditions for supporting students engaging in Web inquiry, there
is still a deep problem, a mindset, that transcends technology: Students
and teachers, at least, believe they should be able to find an answer on
a
specific Web page.
For example, in an ecology unit, a group of students attempted to investigate
their driving question: "What kind of life forms are in the sewers."
They used words like "Ann Arbor," "sewer," and "alligators," and flitted
from Web page to Web page without really digesting their contents; it
was as if they were looking for a Web page entitled "Alligators Discovered
in Ann Arlor Sewers."
Similarly, a 16-year-old spent several class periods looking for an answer
to the question: "What was the worst volcanic eruption in history?" He
surfed from page to page looking for the answer, not stopping to write
down information he found. He didn't think about recording information
and making comparisons for himself. He expected a Web page with the answer.
The assumption there is "the answer" is deep in the psyche of schools.
In one class, several students posed the question: "What is the
temperature of lava?" In this case, they actually found an answer. Or rather
four different answers. This situation could have led to a teachable
moment: Why are we finding four different temperatures--1300 [degrees]
C, 1800 [degrees] C, 1118 [degrees]C, and 1130 [degrees] C.
Instead, the teacher-led discussion focused on which answer was right?
Web resources, too, feed the misconception that answers are readily available
on the net. An excellent source of materials on the Web is the
Electric Library. Available for a modest subscription fee, this site is
a rich collection of appropriate school-age materials. That said, their
advertising brochure (Figure 3) sets up a highly unrealistic expectation
"Just type in a question or key word and you'll have the answer in
seconds." Interestingly, the Electric Library's Web site (www.elib.com)
was recently changed and no longer mentions "answers" to questions,
but focuses on research.
[Figure 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Electronic Learning (Nov. 1996) published an article entitled "Ask-the-Expert
Internet Sites: Where to go for answers to just about any question
you or your students come up with." Bologna! This article is a particularly
egregious example of 1) not using the Web appropriately, and 2)
perpetuating two myths: questions have simple answers, and asking experts
is the way to get questions answered. First, asking experts
questions, even over the Web, will not scale to the 50 million school children
in the U.S. alone. Second, the kinds of questions that students can
and do ask typically do not admit of simple, 2-3 sentence answers. Are
we really trying to teach that the way to solve a problem is to ask
someone else? While "ask-the-expert" sites surely do have a place on the
Web, they are in no way a panacea for learning.
But, if we are going to prepare our children for the demands of the workplace
and the demands of citizenry in a democratic, global community,
then we must help them move beyond thinking that answers to questions can
be simply found. Rather, answers need to be constructed and
synthesized, from all manner of resources.
Search vs. Re-Search
How can we help students ln constructing answers? Let's step back for a
moment and recall how one carried out an investigation in the old days.
When you went to the public or school library to gather information for
a project, you came equipped with notecards, paper, pencils, and time.
You visited the card catalog multiple times; you most likely spoke with
the reference librarian several times. And, you visited the library several
times before the project was finished. The model of inquiry was not search,
but re-search; searching again and again, each time tuning and
tweaking to better hone in on the interesting lines of inquiry.
The Web today is built on a model of one-shot query: search engines don't
let you store previous search results and compare them; search
engines don't make it easy to store hits away in folders to be revisited
later; search engines do not provide mechanisms that enable you to "pick
up where you left off."
But, if we are going to implement the National Research Council standards,
and ask students to engage in sincere inquiry that involves, by
definition, numerous episodes, we need to provide them with tools that
can indeed create an infrastructure to support re-search, not just search.
Conclusion
In its present incarnation the Web is a valuable educational resource.
There are sites on the Web that provide a truly unique learning/experience
(e.g., the NASA pages). The Windows to the Universe site (windows.engin.umich.edu)
provides primary, current, interactive material that
cannot be found in any textbook. But, with respect to supporting inquiry,
the challenges to creating an educationally productive re-searching
experience on the Web are profound.
There is a great opportunity here for technology. In the past, there has
been precious little support for inquiry, with the result being that inquiry
was something only a small percentage of students actually mastered. However,
with the transition from a manufacturing, physical,
labor-oriented economy to a knowledge work-oriented one, we simply must
better prepare the majority of children for thought work, for
inquiry.
Now, the number of teachers per classroom is not going to increase dramatically.
Thus, the only way to get sufficient supports into the
classroom is via technology. The need for effective technology in education
has never been greater; technology is being called on to play a
genuinely pivotal role in teaching and learning.
Heady times, heady times!
Acknowledgments
This article is based on the experiences of some 25 undergraduate and graduate
students, faculty and staff, all involved in creating and deploying
the University of Michigan Digital Library in high schools and middle schools
in Ann Arbor and Detroit, under NSF support (IRI-94-11287 &
REC-9554205). We would particularly like to acknowledge the conversations
we have had with Joe Krajcik, Margaret Roy, Christine Anthony,
Elisabeth Klann, Beth Klein, Tracy Hammerman, and Gene Alloway.
ELLIOT SOLOWAY is the director of the Highly Interactive Computing (Hi-C)
Project.
RAVEN WALLACE is a doctoral candidate in the school of education at the
University of Michigan.
Article A19569205