Guidelines to help kids enhance Internet search skills

Following tips can improve children’s efficiency for online education

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, school closures meant more than 90% of the world's learners had to study virtually or from home. The Internet, already an invaluable educational tool, has therefore become even more important for students. One of the students' most common internet activities is online searching, both in schools and homeschooling. This means teachers, and those parents currently standing in for teachers, need to help students develop skills for searching online.

Unfortunately, research suggests some teachers don't offer such explicit instruction. Some also have trouble structuring (and providing support for) student online search tasks beyond lower-order skills. Evidence even exists of a lack of search skills among teachers and parents themselves.

The following three tips may help:

Focus on 'learning to search' and 'searching to learn'

Making the "invisible" processes behind searches more visible improves the online information-seeking of both teachers and students. In this way, educators (temporary or professional) should design activities that foreground the search process. This makes students more aware of what goes on "behind the scenes" of a search and their ability to affect these processes.

Become more critical users of the web Educators sometimes set tasks that are too broad for students and likely to return millions of search results. Many will probably be irrelevant or inaccurate. Teachers may also set tasks that encourage students to use Google as a mere encyclopedia, which requires only passive lower-order learning. Asking students to find websites with conflicting information purposefully and to describe how they decided which to believe requires that they compare, evaluate and analyse.The number of results a search engine returns can help indicate the quality of your query and make finding reliable information more efficient.

Shift your thinking about search

Attitudes have proven more important than available resources or even teacher skills when increasing students' authentic technology-enabled learning. Many limiting attitudes about search need to be turned around to ensure students get the most out of Google.

We can start switching attitudes about what to search for and how by using the tips above. Some teachers and parents still have much to learn about using Google. The answer is unlikely to be forcing your children to recognise your strengths and their weaknesses. — PTI