Electronic Searches in High School

Since I currently work as an instructional graduate assistant at a university library, I felt I can apply my class to high school student which is the grade level I plan to work with. I teach students how to search databases and the library catalog for academic, authoritative results.

Teach the topic or skill with the intention of students’ positive transfer of their learning.

High school students look for information online all the time. The first thing I would do is find out how many students are familiar with Google, which should be everyone in the class since it’s the most common search engine. Then I would ask what they are looking for online. I can use their examples to explain how they can do the same search in databases and then get authoritative results instead of websites that can be considered nonsense. Finally I can have the students look up the same topics in databases to see what they find.

Teach the topic/skill to facilitate students’ near transfer of their learning.

Students are so used to looking for information electronically that showing them how to search in a databases using keywords they would understand using keywords because most have learned it somewhere or taught themselves. Having them tell me what words to look for will show them how they already have this skill and can apply it to database/catalog searches.

Teach the topic/skill to facilitate students’ far transfer of their learning.

Students can use a lot of these same skills in other ways. For instance, when looking for a topic in a book the student may look up one word and then remember that in electronic searches there are other words to look for as well. So the student wouldn’t just give up the search in the book because one word isn’t there, but instead find synonyms to that word.

Teach the topic/skill to prevent students’ negative transfer of their learning.

One problem I may have with a lesson is that students may think that if they can look up movie times and celebrity gossip on Google, then they should be able to find the information in the database. To prevent this I would need to explain what kind of information is found in databases and catalogs to prevent students from thinking it can answer all questions that are not academic (not to say it can’t answer some).