STIGroup4

Welcome to the Project Wikispace for Quaker Ridge School : Kerri Kruck, Pat Marwell, Michael Pincus

Student Interview Sheets:

Final Reflection Paper:

QUESTION: How do children approach research when not directed down a specific pathway by a teacher? • Do they utilize the directories that the school district provides on the district website or do they go to a commercial website? • Do they ask questions? • Do they narrow the topic? • When online, do they use search engines or directories? Which ones? • How do they evaluate the website? • How long do they stay on a page? • Is it interactive/ social- do they ask friend or parents for help? • How do they approach notetaking? Do they read passages and paraphrase or copy and paste chunks?

METHODS: • The classroom teacher chose six children from among volunteers for Group One, three boys and three girls, to meet with us several times during their lunch hour. • We assigned a topic connected to the big immigration unit in which they were engaged at the time: Explore Asian immigration based upon what you know about 19th century European immigration. • The students knew they would not have to produce a final project after their research activity. • We created a student interview questionnaire (see attached), which explored their computer experience at home. We questioned things like the location of the home computer and parent supervision. • Each teacher watched 2 students as they worked at their computers. We created a checklist for our observations, hoping that it would organize our findings. Our goal was to observe and not to direct. • At first we did not instruct students to take notes; we wanted to see if they would instinctively take notes on their own. Halfway through we supplied them with materials to allow them to take notes. Any note-taking was saved and collected. • Halfway through the process we realized we couldn’t keep track of the students’ research paths by just watching the screen. We started using iShowU to capture their searches. (CD-ROM attached.) • We created a student reflection component, designed to have them analyze their progress at the end of the experience.

FINDINGS: • The random nature of the project and the lack of needing to produce an end product probably negatively affected the intensity of their efforts. • Through the student interview questionnaire, we discovered that they did not understand some very basic computer vocabulary, for example, the difference between a PC and a Mac; that a Dell IS a PC; what a browser is; what a filter does. • If our observations had been set up as one teacher watching one student, we would have been able to ask the students to do more of their thinking out loud. We began to realize that much happen s during the research process that is internal and even automatic. • We observed that students who used the directories (Web Path Express or Nettrekker) seemed to actually read the descriptions for each web site before clicking away. • Our checklist proved to be useless. We could not keep up with what they were doing using the checklist. Much of what they did do, did not fit anywhere on our checklist. • We observed a wide variety of n ote taking methods: Reading and summarizing accompanied by the recording of web addresses; copying and pasting large chunks of unread, non-cited text; writing on post-it notes; and typing and handwriting important ideas. • We observed that they weren’t asking each other for help, but did pick up on things they overhead another student and a teacher talking about, e.g., Angel Island, which none of them had heard of before. • Students have much more experience with computers at home than in an instructional setting. At home they seem to be less closely supervised and half of our small sample went directly to a search engine instead of a browser. This happens despite having been taught the difference between the two tools from third grade on. • We noticed that one-finger typing predominated, which was slow and painful to watch! Should they learn keyboarding? • Only two of six students used electronic dictionary if they encountered an unfamiliar word. Otherwise students merely skipped such words. • We did not observe the students following hyperlinks too often. Two students did pursue the link for the “Chinese Exclusion Act” when encountered on an Angel Island web site. • We did not use the student reflection. The time we had to spend with the students stretched out over too many weeks. The experience was diffuse and disconnected for them. • We wonder if they wonder anything while researching! REFLECTIONS: • In an inquiry of this nature, does a teacher’s inability to just observe and not coach or prompt spoil the project? • It is clear that the students use Google, Yahoo, and AOL unattended at home. When they begin their Capstone project, should we teach them how to use these search engines properly? Some of the Capstone topics do not have many resources written at a fifth grade level, neither books nor websites. This is especially true of websites in directories; directories such as Web Path Express and Nettrekker are designed to support common curricular topics, not the more esoteric ones chosen for some Capstone projects. As a result, Google could be a valuable resource for some students. • The topic we presented to the students to research was too abstract, vague and general. It was too broad for them to manage. We should have narrowed our topic more, just as we require the students to do when formulation their Capstone project. • Children were attending to the task, but if they overheard another child say something they hadn’t thought of, the used that information to produce another keyword. • Once the students realized that Asian immigration consisted of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigration, they used those as key words. We realized if the children had had background information from the beginning, they would have been able to generate better keywords sooner. • Most of the students did not keep track of the sources from which they took notes. We need to continue to teach the children the importance of this skill to facilitate their research and to enable them to produce an accurate bibliography. • Two out of six children had “wonderings” about what they were researching. It was the same two students who sought the answers to their questions about the Chinese Exclusion Act. We realized that most children do not ask questions about the topics they research. This skill needs to be modeled consistently to make them more flexible when conducting research. • After the fact we realized that we could have t racked their searches by viewing the on-screen history and printing the screen after each session.

INTERPRETATIONS AND GOING FORWARD: • Since we know the children are using search engines at home unsupervised, the teaching staff should discuss ways for using search engines like Google productively. We could begin mid-year when the Capstone project begins. Such authorized use of Google and similar search engines would be limited to Capstone research. There is something to be said for learning how to use such search engines properly. The following year they will be in sixth grade and at the Middle School, where Google is a direct link on the school’s Library web site. It is not a direct link on the elementary schools’ library web sites. • Children need practice in skimming and scanning, both in print and online. We should reinforce using the “open-apple + F key” shorcut to “find” the key words in a long text. • They need more practice in noticing the end of a URL and in making decisions about a website’s reliability and suitability. Children need to be directly taught how to find the author of a site and how to determine the validity of the information. • The teaching staff needs to collaborate (classroom teacher, computer teacher, and librarian) more often and more coherently to set up experiences to ensure that the children develop th ese essential skills. • A curriculum map for each grade level would enhance collaborative efforts. • All exercises designed for student practice should avoid being too abstract or general. • We could consider using a student refle ction instrument for all classroom research. If the research is genuine and the effort is more concentrated, these responses could be quite informative. • The splendid new Quaker Ridge Library, with adjoining Computer Lab, was designed for flexible use. Multiple classes will now be able to use the Library at the same time, allowing for more frequent use by classes engaged in research. Having the computer lab connected will greatly facilitate collaboration between the computer teacher and the librarian. • We must try to model and foster a sense of wonder in our students.

Sample of iShowUwork. [|Sample One] [|Sample Two]