Information overload and motivation (Kelli McCaulley, Carroll, Iowa)
Kelli McCaulley said on September 16:
“I am a teacher at Carroll Middle School. When my students are researching online, and with the Internet having endless sources, I feel the students can get information overload. What is the best strategy, specifically for middle school students, to help with extracting relevant information and not just what website comes up first on a search engine? Thanks for your help.”
Great question, Kelli, regarding information overload.
We like to deal with that in a number of places including:
Big #2 – Information Seeking Strategies – focus on selection of SOURCES and which are the best.
Big6 #4 – Use of Information – focus on sifting out the most relevant information in a source (aka reading comprehension).
Big6 #5 – Synthesis – choosing the most appropriate information to use in the presentation/paper/assignment.
One suggestion – don’t try to teach all of these skills/concepts in one assignment. It’s exhausting! So, as noted in the assignment above, perhaps the actual assignment is focused on #2 – compiling a set of the very best sources on a given topic (e..g., wind power, ethanol, elections).
Or – Big6 #2 – brainstorm all possible sources and select the best. Don’t just include a bibliography for an assignment, ask the students to identify “why” they used a particular source. Also ask them to explain why they didn’t use at least one or two other sources.
Looking at extracting relevant information, that’s Big6 4.2. I would start by giving them a set of questions to answer AND the source(s) to use. The assignment is to highlight the relevant sections in the source(s) related to each question. Let’s see if they can identify the right part of a reading before moving on to synthesis.
Speaking of synthesis, how about giving them a writing task and skipping Big6 #2, 3, 4 by giving them a list of facts (with citations) to possibly use for the task. BUT – give them many more facts then they need. Your real intent is to see which of the facts they choose NOT to use.
Let’s make sure they can do each of these skills separately before putting them all together in one assignment.
We should talk further about motivation as well. How do we motivate them to want to do this??
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