How do the kids do online research
In my experience with my students (8-12 year olds), if given a question like, say, “list five famous Africans and what they are famous for”, they will type verbatim into google “list five famous Africans and what they are famous for”, click on the first youtube video, and if that doesn’t give them the exact answer they need, immediately give up.
This is also my experience with my 16-18 year old students. Though they will at least look at the first three articles google gives them…and then give up if they can’t find the exact information
I just wish they knew how to use keywords. Yes, search engines have become really good at interpreting full phrases and pulling keywords from conversational requests, but you can search so much more efficiently if you don’t make them do that.
This also speaks… badly… for the future of misinformation on the internet. No matter how many classes we run about reliable sources.
We literally just had a really great discussion in my class (library of information science degree) about information literacy and who is teaching it to the newer generations and how linked data fits in with it. The answer for some of it is the english teacher does for the most part but kids retain it better and use it faster when the teacher works with the school librarian. Also it depends on what device is being used. Because of the data that search engines keep a teacher and a student can search for the same exact phrase or terminology and they will have completely different results. With the teachers being more relevant because they use their device for work rather than play.
#the keywords confuse the shit out of me#I can’t keep them straight in my head and mix them all up#half the time when I use them it tells me there are no search results.#they only told me about them my junior year of collage so I was already fucked
If you wanted to yell your request for information to your friend on the other side of a loud, crowded party in, like, 3 words, what 3 words would you pick? Those are your search terms.
So in our example in the first post, you do NOT type the full question into your search engine. Making google parse things like ‘list’, ‘5′, and ‘explain’ is going to muddy your results, and this is especially true if you care enough about your data that you’re not using google. Your search terms (WITHOUT quotation marks) would be “famous Africans”, or “famous African people” or “prominent Africans” if you want to be more discerning about what kinds of answers you get.
If you do a lot of online research (as kids in school should do), you pretty quickly get a sense of what sorts of terms are best. For instance, “famous African people” is better than “famous Africans” because the latter is likely to be keywords in a lot of fluff journal article titles, whereas “famous African people” is more likely to bring up lists. “Prominent” will bring up more wealthy businessmen and political leaders, whereas “famous” will bring up more entertainers. But any of these will work. Just pretend the search engine is someone who can’t hear you very well and wants the clearest question in the smallest number of words.
(Although this specific example is bad because anyone with internet research experience answering this question would just go straight to wikipedia, who have lists of these kinds of things, and pick 5 names they like the sound of).
Also, if you wanna get fancy, print this out and stick it on your wall:
(link to higher resolution image)
It will make your life SO MUCH easier. (And, as you can see, this is why typing some questions into google verbatim is a bad idea, especially if you don’t use quotation marks. Not using the quotes and typing in anything with ‘and’ or ‘or’ in it can confuse the search engine.)
Oh wow! Didn’t know a few of these
There are a lot more, but only techies and detectives need them. These ones are sufficient for most of us.
Oomph, for the whole keywords thing if you are on a school database or any database with peer reviewed journals/articles, there will be a thesaurus or an index where you can search for the keywords (aka the controlled vocabulary) that are used on that database. It’s generally kept by the tools or help button or searched easily enough if they dont out right post the button. So if you are looking up journal articles on a specific topic or by a specific person you can search the index for that topic or term and it will tell you outright how many times that term appears within the database and give you alternate terms that are close to it. For example if you are searching for Mary Bolin it might bring up results for
Bolin, Mary
Bolin, Mary A.
Bolin , Mary K.
And so on.
If you are searching for a topic it will tell you the same thing or might even bring up alternate like terms so if you were searching for Behavior Therapy it might bring up
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Behavior
Therapy
Skinner, B. F.
And so on.
Legit controlled vocabulary or (CV) will change with each database but the only nice thing about big publishers having control over all of the articles is that the CV doesnt change as much.
Here is a quick video that explains what boolean operators are and how to use them on databases and search engines that will help narrow or broaden your searches even more.
I have another class day today and don’t want to get started on boolean or Google.
I dont go to this library school but it seems legit enough.
Also check out your local library they generally have awesome databases you can use that are prepaid through your tax dollars if you live in the states.
This video demonstrates how to identify keywords using your research question to develop a search strategy. The UCF Libraries strives to ma
