What's Wrong With Using the Web
for Grade School "Research"?

But let's step back and think about this. Is this a good investment of your child's time, or the time of your child's teachers or of the funding of the school?

Consider...

• Sending kids to the web to find simple factual information reduces emphasis on more appropriate choices: books, encyclopedias, almanacs other printed reference sources, and selected CDROM sources.

• Using the web limits the opportunity for students to master skills in using a home, school or public library, locating printed materials, and in fast and efficient perusal of the contents and indexes of these books and skimming the books' content.

• In middle grades, web searching virtually demands the need for a parent to actively participate in a student's homework, setting a very bad precedent.

• Going to the web (instead of to library books or an encyclopedia) is often grossly inefficient. A lookup of a topic in an encyclopedia takes minutes; on the web, the same search can easily wind up taking an hour of dialing in, searching and sifting through extraneous hits.

• It is more difficult to skim through "pages" on a computer screen (even though they typically have limited text) compared to skimming a meaty printed article.

• High levels of clutter in finding those limited nuggets of relevant information

• Those limited nuggets are often brief, with very low levels of content

• Pages found often have an excessively tight focus for the topic at hand (e.g., a search for "Sacramento River" finds sites on water quality measurement at one particular point on the river, as reported by a company selling water purifiers)

• On the web, the emphasis on many "information" sites is on flashy graphics, cheezy maps, off-topic photos and eye-candy videos. Books, especially encyclopedias and almanacs, strongly emphasize real factual content.

• The mere presence of MTV-like visual clutter is a powerful distractor for those students struggling to stay on-task.

• With a web page in one window, and a word processor document in another, a child can easily copy and paste paragraphs, barely bothering to skim, much less read, the content.

• The vocabulary used in items found by search engines can be well beyond that of middle school students, in terms of word levels, and use of acronyms and abbreviations.

• Browsing through hits of search engines presupposes a level of real-world savvy beyond that of middle school students. For example, seeing "dnr.ca.gov" in the source address tells me (but not a 10 year old) that the source is probably the department of natural resources in the state of California. Or, seeing "www.riverkayaks.com" tells me that the source is likely a commercial business that sells kayaks or kayak trips.

• The vast majority of web sites that will be found do not provide an objective, factual source. This is not at all surprising, as information has value. The majority of sites found in most school-related searches are: links irrelevant to the request at hand, commercial sites, and advocacy pages espousing a specific point of view (well, like this one!)

• The web has many, many places dangerous for a middle school student. Those places are far more dangerous than most parents realize. Sending kids off on web searches when the information they need is readily available through more direct means unnecessarily exposes them to dangerous links.

• The state of the art in web searching is an evanescent technology: Middle school students will not be searching the web this way when they get to high school. So why take valuable time away from real learning to teach them a skill they may not use for very long?

Excessive use of the web may be a red flag warning that a school is more obsessed about trendy technology and what is known as the "process" or "tools" approach to education than it is about factual learning. The progressivist philosophy that dominates American education today discards the notion of a base of core knowledge. Instead, they cling to a vague fantasy that a future citizen doesn't need to know what century the Civil War was in, or how many feet are in a mile, or what country Toronto is in, but rather can somehow function well by looking up information as it's needed. So-called "research" has taken the place of learning, "discovery" has taken the place of teaching, and skills are valued over knowledge.

That's nonsense to the parents and teachers who recognize that a base of common, core knowledge is not only essential for true critical thinking and understanding, but also for equity and opportunity in a diverse society.

Is your elementary school child spending way too much time doing "webquests" or so-called "research" on miniscule topics ("What Pioneer Children Played With", "The Harlem Renaissance", "The Life Cycle of Frogs") but a disturbingly small amount of time in whole-class instruction in factual content?

Bottom line:

Compared to printed and CDROM sources, the web is a poor or inefficient medium (and possibly a dangerous one) for finding objective, thorough, unbiased source documents.

A library is where you go to find facts. The web is more like a garage sale: it's possible you'll find what you want, but only with a lot of digging, searching, and wading through things that smell funny.