Skeptics On The Internet: Teaching Students To Read Critically

By Author: White
Total Articles: 39
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I have always tried to incorporate technology in productive ways in my classroom. I have done this in part because students like to use technology, but also because I have felt that technology in the classroom reflected the world that students would enter when they left school. It has made perfect sense to me, then, to incorporate Internet research into the assignments I give my students. I Breitling Replica know that people in the "real world" (including myself) are using the Internet more and more to find information, so I felt sure that it would benefit my students to do the same.

I soon realized, though, that students weren't very good at using the Internet in productive ways to find information. Of most concern, students had little idea how to distinguish websites with legitimate, trustworthy information from those containing spurious, questionable information. I worried that students who could not read critically to determine the validity of information they found online were bound to be frustrated or—even worse— ...
... harmed by their trust in the misleading information they would encounter. I could have limited students to a preselected list of websites or authorized them to only use selective search engines such as Google Scholar—and I did occasionally impose these kinds of limits on Internet research in the classroom. But I also felt that students needed to know how to evaluate what they encountered in the results of more natural searches using search engines such as Google, Ask.com, or Yahoo.

When I set out to find strategies I could use to help students, I gained some insight into the nature of the problem we faced. I had assumed that my good print readers would be naturally good at reading online, that those skills they used to make sense of print texts would be what they needed for Internet texts. However, Julie Coiro and Elizabeth Dobler have shown that specific features of Internet texts (such as the presence of hyperlinks and embedded multimedia) place unique demands on readers (240—43). The feature of Internet texts that concerned me in this case was the lowered barrier to publication for Internet authors. With traditional print texts, editorial safeguards are often in place that helps ensure the validity of information presented in them. No such safeguards exist for much of what is published online, thus heightening the need for critical reading skills (Leu et al.).

I found a number of suggestions that Cartier Replica Watches would help students develop these skills. Two Web resources that I found invaluable—Walt Howe's "Evaluating Quality" and Robert Harris's "Evaluating Internet Research Sources"—recommend that when reading to evaluate, students should look for information about the author and judge whether he or she is an authority on the subject in question. Given that advertising has become pervasive on the Internet, Coiro suggests that students also look carefully for commercial (or other) motives in materials they encounter online.
Furthermore, Donald Leuet al. argues that we should encourage students to look at how an author constructs the message to help reveal biases that might influence the validity of information. Students should also seek to corroborate information they find online across multiple sources