Electronic information literacy is becoming increasingly more important in the current information age. For young people to succeed in school, therefore, they must be knowledgeable about how to find, evaluate, and utilize electronic sources. This statement is clearly supported by both the American Library Association (ALA) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).
The ALA describes five information literacy objectives. These include:
Knowing when they (students) have a need for information.
Identifying information needed to address a given problem or issue.
Finding needed information and evaluation the information.
Organizing the information.
Using the information effectively to address the problem or issue at hand.
In addition, ISTE suggests that the technology literate student will be able to:
Demonstrate a sound understanding of the nature and operation of technology systems.
Use technology tools to locate, evaluate and collect information from a variety of sources.
Evaluate and select new information resources and technological innovations based on the appropriateness to specific tasks.
Although broad in scope, these goals presented by the ALA and ISTE provide substantial guidance to educators who are currently attempting to integrate the use of electronic information sources (or more precisely, the Internet) with existing curriculums. This has proven to be no easy task as educators and parents must learn to balance their concerns that students will not learn how to effectively access and use appropriate material located on the Internet with the clear utility of providing such a powerful tool for learning. Project K12-Search, therefore, is a collaborative effort developed to address some of these concerns and to help school efforts to better utilize the Internet. Specifically, Project K12-Search consists of both a set of student lessons that focus on the development of information literacy skills and a new type of Internet search engine interface that better reflects the needs and concerns of the K-12 environment.
Three main goals help guide our work:
To develop strategies that will help students better understand what the Internet is and how it works.
To explore guided learning opportunities that will help students better find, evaluate, and utilize Internet resources (electronic information literacy skills).
To develop an Internet search engine that will better help students find and explore age and content appropriate materials throughout the Internet.
An additional point here is that the skills being developed though the efforts of this project are not exclusively computer specific. In other words, the students will be able to apply the information literacy skills learned to non-electronic sources as well.
The goal of the project is to teach information literacy skills to students using information on the Internet. The project began with an emphasis on just three information literacy skills: locating, evaluating, and organizing information. These are the information literacy skills most easily supported by Information Retrieval software. They also form the core of information literacy standards published by groups such as the American Library Association (ALA), the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).
As the project progressed, a need developed for a slightly broader and more detailed description of the desired information literacy skills. The ALA's Information Literacy standard most closely matches the project goals, but it lacks detail in important areas. The American Association of School Librarian's (AASL's) Nine AASL Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning, while broader than needed for the EILEE project, provides detailed and particularly helpful descriptions ("indicators") for each information literacy skill. Our solution was to adopt the ALA's Information Literacy standard, and to use AASL indicators to provide detailed descriptions of each skill. The resulting hybrid is shown below.
1) Knowing when they have a need for information
a) Recognizes the need for information (AASL-1.1).
b) Formulates questions based on information needs (AASL-1.3).
c) Identifies key concepts and terms that describe the information need (ACRL-1.1.e).
2) Identifying information needed to address a given problem or issue
a) Knows how information is formally and informally produced, organized, and disseminated (ACRL-1.2.a).
b) Identifies a variety of potential types and sources of information (AASL-1.4).
c) Identifies the type of information that is needed for the task.
d) Evaluates the likelihood of finding useful information at each source.
3) Finding needed information and evaluating the information
a) Finding
i) Uses search tools effectively.
ii) Recognizes document structure and uses it for navigation.
iii) Ability to adjust information seeking strategy based on intermediate results.
b) Evaluating
i) Determines accuracy, relevance and comprehensiveness (AASL-2.1).
ii) Distinguishes among fact, point of view and opinion (AASL-2.2).
iii) Identifies inaccurate and misleading information (AASL-2.3).
iv) Selects information appropriate to the problem or question at hand (AASL-2.4).
4) Organizing the information
a) Records all pertinent citation information for future reference (ACRL-2.5.c).
b) Organizes information for practical application (AASL-3.1).
i) Sorting by information type (pictures, text, etc).
ii) Sorting by levels & divisions, broader/narrower, etc.
iii) Sorting by information source.
c) Applies information in critical thinking and problem solving (basic, identifies information that meets a particular information need) (AASL-3.3) [Should this be moved down to be 5.c?]
5) Using the information effectively to address the problem or issue at hand
a) Restates the textual concepts in his/her own words (ACRL-3.2.b).
b) Integrates new information into one's knowledge (AASL-3.2).
c) Produces and communicates information and ideas in appropriate formats (basic, names a variety of different formats for presenting different kinds of information (AASL-3.4).
d) Acknowledges the use of information by citing sources (ACRL-4.4.a).
This hybrid also includes lists of specific skills (e.g., sorting by information type) that are not usually included in information literacy standards or guidelines. These lists are included for our convenience, to document specific skills that students will learn in EILEE lessons. These lists of skills are not exhaustive, nor are they complete. It is likely that additional skills will be added as lessons are refined or as new lessons are developed.
Project K12-Search consists of 13 lessons that can be used either as a unit or separately to help students in their learning of specific Internet related material. These lessons have been field-tested with elementary students. They could also be modified for middle and secondary students.
The lessons were developed to introduce a number of Internet related topics. Some of these topics apply more specifically to younger students, but other students (of all ages) too can benefit. Although diverse in scope, each of the lessons has certain commonalties as well. For example, each lesson utilizes a dynamic, hands-on approach to learning. Also, both student and teacher evaluation is stressed throughout. Lastly, many of the lessons require little or no actual Internet access. This allows schools no yet "wired" to still introduce important topics to students who might have Internet access at home or through the library.
Lesson One: A Guided Tour
More and more schools are providing their students access to the Internet. While some students have the skills needed to manipulate this media, others are either not aware of or need assistance in finding what is available on the Internet. Schools must, therefore, help provide all students with the basic skills needed to find and utilize information on the Internet. This pre-assessment lesson is developed to help teachers better determine the Internet skill level of each student as well as to provide time for each student to learn basic computer skills need to use the Internet.
Lesson Two: The Internet Simulation
The Internet simulation lesson is a first step in conveying to students the idea that the Internet is not a 'place', rather it is made up of a large number of computers located around the world and connected by telephone wire. In addition, the simulation lesson demonstrates to students that specific questions must be addressed to appropriate locations. The simulation accomplishes this by providing students the opportunity to visualize in their own minds what the Internet is and, in a very general sense, how it works.
Lesson Three: The Scavenger Hunt I
The Internet Scavenger Hunt is a sequence of three lessons that teach students to find information in Internet documents. The emphasis is on locating answers to specific questions, and on locating information that indicates how reliable the answers might be. The Scavenger Hunt questions fall into three categories, with "level one" questions considered easiest and "level three" questions being most difficult.
This lesson is the first in the sequence of three lessons. The emphasis in this first lesson is on learning skills. Significant teacher interaction is involved, primarily in the form of providing guidance and answering questions as students perform the tasks. Lessons two and three involve practicing and using the skills learned in this lesson, so less teacher involvement is required.
Lesson Four: The Scavenger Hunt II
This lesson is the second in the sequence of three lessons. The emphasis in this second lesson is on practicing skills. The tasks are accomplished in exactly the same manner as in the first Scavenger Hunt lesson. The only differences are that a different set of questions is used, and that the questions rely more on fill-in-the-blank than on multiple choice. Teacher interaction is primarily in the form of answering questions as students perform the tasks.
Lesson Five: The Scavenger Hunt Poster
This lesson is the third in the sequence of three lessons. The emphasis in this third lesson is on using Scavenger Hunt skills to accomplish educational tasks. The task is to create a poster that provides information about some subject and the Internet site that was the source of information. Teacher interaction is primarily in the form of answering questions as students perform the tasks.
Lesson Six: Computer Matching Simulation
Successful information seeking depends on a student's ability to clearly understand and articulate the information that is needed (the question). Searching the web, students also need to learn how to ask for the needed information in a way that will yield the best results - they need to understand what the computer "understands." The Searching I lesson is designed to teach a student the "pre-search" skills of understanding the central information need by understanding the question and considering the different ways a question can be asked. The lesson also introduces students to a simplified idea of how search engines work; computers are good at recognizing words, not ideas. The strategy of query expansion-trying more than one word-is revealed. Although these skills are transferable to information seeking in print environments or with a variety of search engine interfaces, a primary goal of the lesson is to prepare students for the K12Search Interface, which will allow them to add extra keywords to their search questions.
Too often the utility of Internet content must be weighed against the effort a child or teacher must expend to find material suitable for a particular lesson. Simply put, searching for information on the Internet can be time consuming and frustrating. One variable confounding a better match between the needs of educational institutions and the power of the Internet is the dependence on traditional Web search engines to find appropriate educational material. These Web search engines provide raw horsepower, but offer little assistance in guiding and harnessing this power. In other words, Web searches often suffer from high recall (many useful things found) and low precision (even more useless things found). Teachers, and especially children, do not have the time or the attention span to sift through large numbers of documents to find the few of interest.
K12-Search is developing software that helps bring the power of the Internet and Web search engines to the classroom in a form suitable for teachers and students. K12-Search is a new graphical user interface developed exclusively for K-12 schools and their specific needs. For example, K12-Search makes it easy to locate relevant and age-appropriate material on the Internet. In addition, K12-Search helps educators and young people organize the vast materials found.
The K12-Search interface guides students through the process of formulating and describing their information needs. Modified versions of traditional Information Retrieval (IR) tools will transform the information need into a search query, utilizing knowledge of teacher objectives, student level, and subject matter. The intent is to let children express their information needs in English, have the software transform it into a complex structured query, and pass it off to the Web search engine. Returned results are organized automatically, using clustering and machine learning techniques. This is viewed as a 'second stage' of searching, done at the interface, in which results are organized and further filtering takes place. The software also has the opportunity to learn over time, essentially tailoring or tuning the clustering software to better match the cognitive style of each user.
The sequence of lesson plans along with the unique attributes of the K12-Search engine combine to provide a very powerful tool to teachers interested in integrating the effective use of the Internet into their classroom curriculum.
A Microsoft Word version of this document is available here.
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