High School Students and
Their Use of the World Wide Web for Research
Michael Lorenzen
The emergence of the World Wide Web has created another information resource for conducting research. The World Wide Web is a wonderful tool for individuals and organizations that want to reach large numbers of people. It is also a great resource for finding information on current events. However, the lack of traditional gate keeping that print material has used to filter information, such as editors and peer reviewing, is for the most part missing on the World Wide Web. This puts the users of the Web in the position of having to be their own gatekeepers of information. This has presented challenges in particular to students who are trying to find scholarly or factual information on the Web who are not necessarily able to evaluate the information they find. More bothersome is the fact that many students are not aware of proper methods of evaluating the Web and may not be aware that they need to do so.
A study was conducted in the Spring of 2000 of a group of high school students. The study consisted of interviewing students about how they used the World Wide Web to find information for school assignments. In particular, the students were asked how they went about finding information and how they knew if the information they found on the Web was scholarly or factual. It was hoped that the results of this study would help school, public and academic librarians understand how high school students use the Web in research. School and public librarians are dealing with this group now. Within a few years, all of the high school students in the United States will be of college age. This means that academic librarians will be dealing with Web evaluation skills of these students soon. By understanding how high school students evaluate the Web, it will help academic librarians prepare to deal with the research needs of the students. The results of the study indicated that while high school students are still using libraries, they are also using the Web and their ability to evaluate the information they find on the Web is weak.
There have been a variety of studies looking at how pre-college students use the World Wide Web and online library catalogs for finding information. Two separate studies found that elementary school students could use online library catalogs (i). If this age group can do so successfully, it is probably safe to assume high school students can as well. Another study found that elementary school students could also use the World Wide Web (ii). However, the researchers found that students had trouble constructing searches and with spelling. They also discovered that the students shied away from sites on the Web that did not contain pictures.
Two recent studies found that high school students lacked information-seeking skills (iii). Despite this, another study found that regardless of the quality of their search strategies, high school students still tended to find the information that they need for assignments (iv). Another study found that high school students had very clear criteria to tell the difference between bad and good web sites (v). Finally, another study found that the Web research behavior of high school students was good (vi). The researchers found that students were flexible in their searches and were quick to withdraw from bad searches. The students liked the Web because it had a variety of formats, it showed pictures, it covered a lot of subjects, and it was easy. They disliked web sites that were slow to load.
One writer noted that the major difficulty in the use of the World Wide Web by children was their inability to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information (vii) . Children valued an information site on the Web if it was easy to find and use. These same students did not take a lot of time to actually evaluate the site for accuracy. Finally, another study found that students of African-American backgrounds were less likely to use the Web for research because they were less likely to have an opportunity to gain access to the Web (viii).
Theories and Assumptions
The author based his theoretical framework for the approach to this study on Perry's Scheme of Student Development and the problems caused by the advent of the World Wide Web and the lack of an accepted system for determining the validity of information on it. Perry wrote that students in the first two stages of his scheme, which describes the vast majority of high school students, either seek out authorities to give them answers or see all viewpoints as equally valid (ix) . The nature of the Web, and the difficulty it presents in verifying information, means that students in the early stages of Perry's Scheme are going to have difficulty in using the Web appropriately.
Perry
Perry postulated that students go through four stages of development in their critical thinking skills. These are dualism, multiplicity, contextual relativism, and dialectic. As students move through these stages, they become more sophisticated critical thinkers. The students change their views about the nature of knowledge as they progress. Their view of authority changes as well and it impacts how they think about teachers and other sources of information.
The beginning level of Perry's Scheme is dualism. Students in this stage believe that all questions have definite right and wrong answers. They expect that the teacher will tell them what the right answer is and that their job as a student is to memorize this answer. These students also tend to accept what they read in books at face value if it is presented to them from an approved source like a textbook. The students do not see themselves as creators of knowledge and do not believe they are capable of determining what the right answer is on their own.
The second level of Perry's Scheme is multiplicity. At this stage, students believe that questions may in fact have multiple answers. However, they give all opinions the same weight because the students are unable to choose between competing opinions. To these students, everything is relative and knowledge is never certain. These students see the teacher as a guide through the variety of equally valid opinions.
The final two stages of Perry's Scheme are beyond most high school students and many undergraduate college students as well. These stages are contextual relativism and dialectic. In contextual relativism, students realize that opinions need support to gain validity. For example, the Nobel prize Committee does not give out the award for their opinion of a book's quality, but for its literary merit. In the dialectic stage, students can view problems from a variety of different viewpoints and recognize that best answers for questions depend on which approach the question is being asked from. The students take on roles of meaning makers and are capable of presenting unique looks on a question on their own.
World Wide Web
The nature of the World Wide Web makes it difficult for students who are in the first two stages of Perry's Scheme to use the Web effectively. The traditional print media made many of the decisions about the validity of information. The Web has lost this gate keeping function for information students are cast in the role of having to determine if something is true or not on their own. For students from dualistic or multiplictic views, this is hard to do successfully. An overview of the development of the Web can help to frame this idea.
The advent of the World Wide Web has been the most significant occurrence in the production and delivery of information since the invention of the Guttenberg printing press. The appearance of the printing press broke the hold of the church and learned societies to monopolize the process of deciding which books to copy manually and preserve in monasteries and estates. From then on, a printing industry emerged that allowed for a greater number of books. Further, these books were spread widely and were available to those who could afford them. A visit to a distant monastery was no longer required. In the same way, the existence of the World Wide Web is a revolution for information. Now, instead of the publishing industry deciding which writing gets published, the individual decides. Anyone with access to the Web with a little knowledge is now a publisher of any information they want to present. And anyone with access to the Web, with a little work, can find this information.
When the printing press was invented, it took several centuries for its full impact to be felt. For a long time, there were few printing presses and many still could not get their works to publishers. Further, books were expensive and only the well off could afford them. It was a long time before the average citizen could gain access to the new information world. This is not true with the World Wide Web. Within a decade of the emergence of the Web, its reach is nearly universal in western culture. The vast majority of households in the United States have a computer and the option of accessing the Web. Even the poor have access to computers and the Web in the United States if they visit a public library.
The difficulty in validating information on the Web has created a huge problem for seekers of information and scholars. There has not been enough time for the World Wide Web to develop a system of authenticating the information that is on the Web. True, invalid information did and does appear in printed material. However, there was always at least one level of gate keeping (and usually many more), that allowed interested and generally qualified individuals to pass judgment on whether the item should be published. While information still needed to be evaluated in the print media, an examination of the publisher or journal could often lend credible evidence to the information within a piece of print. The wonder of the Web is that this has been stripped away. And it may prove impossible to ever recreate this system Web wide. This is wonderful for democracy, but it is also a headache for those trying to verify the information at a web site.
The high school students of today have come of age in this new information revolution. From the time they started elementary school, the World Wide Web existed. Many of them were using the Web early in their school careers. They have difficulty imagining a time when they could not turn on their computer, surf the Web, and find information. It is as simple and as natural as it was for older generations of students to open up an encyclopedia or check the old card catalog for books on the topic. This is a profound difference in the way these students seek and view knowledge from every prior generation of humanity. And this new view, assuming something completely unexpected happens, will be the one that librarians and teachers will be dealing with from now on.
All of this has meant that the current group of high school students is the first generation to have to deal with such uncertainty in the validity of the information they find. Since the World Wide Web is still relatively new, teaching how to evaluate information on the Web is in its infancy. Educators, who often are less sophisticated than the students in their understanding of the Web, have had difficulty in teaching students how to evaluate what they find on the Web. The author believes that this has had consequences on the student's information evaluation skills. It was hoped that a study of high school students would reveal how students are using the to find information and how they are evaluating this information. If this is understood, it will be easier to understand the assumptions of high school and colleges students make towards the Web and help to better educate them towards the best use of the Web as an information resource.
Perry's Scheme for Student Development, while developed prior to the invention of the World Wide Web, can be used to understand the behavior of high school students and the Web. Dualistic students will use the Web to look for the one right answer to the question. They will seek authority so they can learn what this answer is. The variety of web pages will confuse them and they will looks for clues that a web site is indeed authoritative. They will have difficulty in determining which web sites have valid information and which ones do not. Students at the multiplicity stage will see the variety of opinions expressed on the many web sites as being equally valid. They may not see the need to filter information for quality as all web sites to them may be equally valid.
The author expected to find several things about high students and their use of the World Wide Web. The first was that high school students went to the Web as their primary information resource. The author believed that books and libraries were consulted only as a last resort or because the teacher who assigned homework forbade or restricted Web use. While all the students used the Web, the author was incorrect. The students used a variety of resources when seeking information including the Web and libraries.
One author had found that students preferred using the World Wide Web because it was easy (x). The author expected this attitude to show up in the interviews. It did not. The choice of questions asked did not really lend themselves to exploring this issue. Still, it was thought that the ease of Web use versus library use would be addressed by students. The lack of this response does not mean that students do not believe this. Many probably do and use the Web for this reason particularly if an assignment has been put off until it is almost due. However, this reason is not preventing students from using libraries or consulting books.
Librarians and scholars tend to accept knowledge because it has been examined and accepted by those who are qualified to judge it. Peer reviewed journals are the standard by which the academic and medical communities determine what is significant enough to publish and join the existing body of literature on a subject. Even books have a certain level of peer review embodied within them because editors and then publishers have to decide to publish them. The worst of writing usually fails to make it past this important gate keeping process. Even when bad material is published, it is generally easy to identify. The World Wide Web confuses this. It is harder to determine bad information on the Web if it is presented well and the apparent author/publisher appear credible. And no great peer review system has sprung up on the Web yet to mirror that which exists in the printed world.
The author believed that the students of today do not hold knowledge to this standard. They are unsure how to evaluate it and the evaluations they do make do little to screen out the best written of bad knowledge. Students look to see who wrote a page without realizing that the real credentials of the author may not be listed. Students looks to search engines to weed out bad web sites not realizing that few search engines do this. Students look for spelling and grammatical errors on pages not realizing that the worst of information may in fact be amongst the best written.
The author did find the other idea that he expected to find. It was believed that high school students have not developed adequate skills to evaluate the information that they find on the World Wide Web. The students are the pioneer generation forced to deal with the vast, unauthenticated resource before the Web has had time to develop a widely accepted standard of authenticity and before real meaningful Web evaluation skills are being taught to students. It is believed by this author that this has meant that students are weak at determining the validity of an information resources and that the students accept knowledge if it is on a neat looking and easy to access web page. This is what the author found in interviewing these students.
Methodology
Interviews were conducted with high schools students in the Spring of 2000. Most of the students (19 of them) attended the same private high school in the Lansing, Michigan area. The interviews conducted at the high school were tape recorded and later transcribed. In addition, another six students were interviewed at the Michigan State University Main Library and came from several local high schools. Parental consent for student participation was secured in advance when the students were minors. The students also signed consent forms. Both parents and students were promised confidentiality.
The students who were interviewed tended to come from similar backgrounds. All of the students were white. This may have an impact on the results of the study as previous research has found that African-American students have less access to the Web than white students (xi). This may effect the validity of the study with non-white students. Thirteen of the 25 students were in the 10th Grade. The other 12 were 12th Graders. Most of the students were female as well. Only 9 of the 25 students were male. This may also skew the study results towards the experiences of females in web use and web evaluation.
The students were asked the following questions:
1. Can you tell me your age and grade? 2. When you are given an assignment at school that requires you to look up information, how do you start your search for information?
3. What types of assignments are you likely to use the Web for?
4. How do you gain access to the Web?
5. What types of web sites would you use to find facts?
6. What types of web sites would you not use?
7. How do you know if the information on a web site is good?
8. How do you get help in finding information?
Clarifying questions were used with the students if the author believed they would be useful in soliciting additional information. Many of the students had difficulty in answering some of the questions and there were long pauses in the interview as they thought of answers.
Findings
The interviews were for the most part brief. The reason for this is that the students showed a great deal of hesitancy in answering some of the questions. They struggled to answer the questions and after a few moments would say a few sentences to move on to the next question. Some of the students gave longer, more articulate answers but it became clear that once we got beyond how the student looked up information and what topics they looked up on the World Wide Web, the students have given very little thought to how to evaluate what they found on the Web.
The author believed that some of the students might not have access to the World Wide Web and it might make it difficult for the student to answer most of the interview questions. As such, a question was added asking how the student accessed the Web. All of the students had access to the Web however. Most had access at home and at their school. A few even used the local public library to get on the Web. This is probably representative of most high school students in the United States. Although some students may not have access to the Web, these same students do not have to grapple with the question of how to evaluate the Web. As such the responses of the students in this study are for the most part probably typical of a large number of Web-using students.
Another clear response from the students was that they asked librarians or teachers for help when they got stuck when doing research. Another popular but less common answer was that family members and friends provided help. One girl said, "I ask my little brother because he is good at computer stuff." While this reliance on librarians and teachers for help sounds encouraging, the author believes this response may have been tainted. All of the students were told the author was a librarian. It seems to the author that many of the students were pleased to answer this question by saying they asked for help from a librarian. This may have been true but they may also have been telling the author in this instance what they believed the author wanted to hear.
When students were asked where they look up information for school assignments, two clear answers were given. Most of the students said they used both a library and the World Wide Web. A few students relied exclusively on the Web. None of the students relied exclusively on libraries. One student said, "I'll usually go to the school library, but sometimes I don't have time. Then I'll use the Internet at my friend's house sometimes because ours isn't hooked up right now. I'll either go to my friend's house or go to the local public library." Another student who didn't use libraries said, "Typically, I'll start either by one of two methods from the same location, a computer. I'll either go to an online encyclopedia or I'll use the Internet for obtaining information." A more library centric student responded, "I usually go to the library and go on one of the computers and see what kind of stuff I find. I prefer to use just books before going on the Web." It became clear that these high school students are using both the library and the Web to search for information for school assignments.
When asked what type of assignments they used the World Wide Web for, the students gave a variety of responses. History and current events were the most common responses by far. Said one student,
Probably assignments dealing with history or say a biography of a person or a current event. Certainly a current event type of an issue when what you need to write about it or explain it, it would be very useful. The Web would be very useful for that. Another student responded in a manner that reflected a wide scope, "Nightly assignments, stuff that is not extremely important and then anything that I have heard that there are web sites on the Internet to look for." In addition to current events and history, several other topics that were cited as being good to look up on the Web included biography, book reviews, and science. One student told the author that the Web was the best source of information on genetics. Also noted by a few students was that the Web was a good spot for information on computers and for finding maps.
The students were asked what type of web sites they used to find facts. This is the first of the questions to give many of the students pause. Over half of the students responded by saying that they used search engines to find sites with facts. Yahoo was mentioned the most often but other search engines such as Alta Vista and Dogpile were also cited. The second most common answer was web pages from "institution like places." Universities, libraries, museums, and government agencies were considered acceptable to many of the students for facts. News sites also were mentioned several times. Responded one student, "Newspaper web sites like USA Today, or going through Yahoo to search through and then to make sure the source is credible, go back to a newspaper or online scientific journal." Many students also felt that online encyclopedias (like Encyclopedia.Com and the online Britannica) were good spots. The web extension .org on a web site meant facts to a few students as did information found at America Online.
Students also wrestled with the reverse of the last question. They were asked what web sites they would avoid for finding facts. After a moment of hesitation, the most common response was personal web pages. The students did not trust a personal page because they believed anyone could put them up. Another popular choice was pornographic sites. One student pointedly told me, "I don't use porno pages because that would violate school policy."
While many of the students in the previous question used the extension .com to indicate good sites for facts, many of the students in this question cited .com's as sites to avoid. One student said, "I don't really like to use .com. I don't really know how well they are or how like truthful they are. I like to stick to educational ones and the government ones where the facts are at. I usually pick these before .com." Another student spoke similarly, "If it ends in .com there is a chance that it is not true, because .gov and .edu are more credible institutions." Other web sites to avoid according to the students were sites that had errors, were "outrageous", lacked a bibliography, or did not appear to have a copyright.
The students had the greatest difficulty with the question of how they knew the information on a web site was good. The most common answer was that the student did not know. Many of the students struggled with this question, gave the author a few tentative responses, and then said they did not know. The students also used the source or author of the information to determine if it was reliable. Said one student,
There is a bibliography to back it up, if it says who it is published by, if there is not any information on who wrote it or where it came from then I know its not going to be good. Well, it could be but it doesn't have anything so I am not going to trust it. Or if it is published by something I am familiar with and I know it has good information. Another student responded similarly by saying, "Usually it says like the national history foundation or things like that at the bottom of the page, or if from a library or has other links to libraries and things like that." Students also evaluated web site by the domain extension after the dot in the web address. Other criteria used to judge how good the information on a web site were how elaborate the web site was, if the information was believable, and whether or not the web site had a bibliography.
One special interview story is of note here. One female student told me she didn't ever use web sites that had spelling errors on them. She said,
I was doing a project and I thought I had a bunch of information about Kenya, and I thought it was really good and I was looking through it and found misspelled words. I didn't think it was fake information but I couldn't be sure it was factual. I think you can put up just anything. After the author turned off the tape recorder, the student wanted to talk some more about some of the questions. She wanted to hear the author's answer to some of the questions that were asked. She also told me more about the Kenyan web site she discounted because it had spelling errors. The student said that she was sure that the misspelled web page was an official Kenyan government web site about Kenyan National Parks. The author looked for this page and found it after finishing the interviews for the day. The "misspelled" words turned out to be British rather than American spellings of the words. For example, the spelling of honor as honour convinced her the page was not trustworthy.
Discussion
The findings of this study are a mixed bag for librarians and teachers. The students showed many positive habits towards their use of the World Wide Web. The use of libraries and the Web by students shows a level of sophistication that is promising. Students using the Web for current events and news sites, their trust of institutional web sites, and their avoidance of pornographic web sites for facts are all positive signals. Several other findings signal both positive and negative consequences. Students are trusting the Web for book reviews, history, and biographical information. The Web can be good for these but caution must be used. The students also give a lot of credence to whether a web site has spelling or grammatical errors on it. This is good but an absence of errors does not indicate quality. Students also look at the source and authorship of a web page, which is helpful, but they do not seem to grasp that this is easy to fabricate. Finally, students are having difficulty in evaluating the Web despite the positives noted above. Students mistakenly believe that search engines screen for quality. Students are inappropriately using web sites to conduct science searches. Students believe that certain domain extension guarantee quality when they do not. And they also give too much credence to how good or elaborate a page looks.
The finding that high schools students are still using libraries is not surprising. Print material and libraries are still valued by society despite the growth of the World Wide Web. The teachers who have given assignments to the students in the study still value the knowledge held in libraries. Many of these teachers are skeptical of the Web. This attitude has influenced the high school students in this study. This is undoubtedly happening throughout the western world. However, the students themselves like the Web and do use it for finding information. For them, the library and the Web are both equally valid locations for good information.
This use of both resources by high school students shows a great deal of research sophistication. Using a variety of sources for research has always been encouraged by librarians. The World Wide Web is an additional information resource that librarians want students to use. The difficulty that librarians have with the Web is the ease by which anyone can put up anything without the reader having any method of verifying it. Therein lies the potential drawback to this positive development. The information in libraries and the information on the Web are not equal. The information in the library has gone through levels of gate keeping. Most of the Web material has not.
Perhaps coupled with this still existent use of libraries is the respect students show web pages produced by institutions. Students are aware of the fact that they need to cite web pages that their teachers will find acceptable. And as this study showed, many students are aware of their own failings in evaluating the information on a web site as shown by the large number of "I do not know" response to how the student tells good from bad information on a web site. It is reasonable to assume that this leads many students to rely and trust institutional sites produced by universities, respected and well known organizations, and the government. This is also to be expected from dualistic students in Perry's Scheme who are looking for authorities to give them the right answer. It is still possible to be mislead by these institutions, but the reliability of the information on their web pages is seen as greater by the students. This is true and the fact that students have realized this is a good development.
One of the best uses for the World Wide Web is staying abreast of current events. Libraries simply can not compete with the Web for what is happening in the world today or the last several months. There is a lag in scholarly books and journals which keep the newest material libraries a year or more behind. There are a large number or reliable new sites on the Web that make it easy for students to find out what is going on around the world. By sticking to the main news services, many of whom exist in the print and broadcasting worlds as well, the student can be fairly certain the information presented has been screened for accuracy. And again, these sites would be reassuring to students who are dualistic in Perry's Scheme. It is wonderful that high school students have realized this and are using the Web for this purpose.
This study also showed that students are not using what they consider to be pornographic web sites to conduct research. The study does not suggest that high school students are not consulting these sites however. Many of the students are aware of the existence of these sites and many undoubtedly use them for non-research purposes. However, the students are not expecting to find scholarly or factual material there and avoid their use in conducting research. It is unlikely that their teachers would consider the use of these sites in an assignment acceptable anyway but the author believes the students have come to believe on their own that these sites are not good to use for research.
One positive and negative discovery of this study is that high school students are using online World Wide Web encyclopedias for finding facts. Two that were noted repeatedly by the students were Encyclopedia.Com and the online Encyclopedia Britannica. The students clearly recognize these sources as good locations to find facts. This is positive that the students recognize this. However, traditionally both high school and certainly college students have been told not to use encyclopedias when writing research papers except to get background material that is not cited. These two Web encyclopedias are virtually identical to the print encyclopedias that they are based upon. Why then do students feel they can use these resources in research? Do they feel that since the encyclopedia is now on the Web that it has been magically transformed into better information? Evidently teachers are accepting these resources as valid citations in high school papers if the students are using them. Why are the teachers doing this? Teachers should indeed encourage students to consult encyclopedias of any variety (print or Web) to get basic information but should be consistent in insisting that neither form is appropriate for citing. To do otherwise is to send students the message that information on the Web is superior to print material even if it is identical. That is an erroneous and dangerous message to send to students.
Another criterion being used by students when evaluating information on the World Wide Web is considering the authorship of the web page. This is also positive because this step alone can be the most useful in determining the credibility of information. Several students mentioned they look for degrees at the end of names. The students are thinking about the qualifications of the authors of web pages. The drawback to this is that students may not be aware that authorship of web pages is not always as advertised. Further, qualifications listed at a site may be fabricated or made to appear greater than they really are. Did the author really earn a Ph.D? If so, is it from a credible school and not a diploma mill? Even then, what is the degree in? Does this author's doctorate in education really qualify him to write about medicine? These questions would be asked by a publisher well before a book was published. On the Web, the student must ask this question. The students appear to be asking about authorship. However, they do not seem aware that their questions are not necessarily being answered by their evaluation criteria. Further, students from the multiplicity viewpoint in Perry's Scheme may not be as concerned about the qualifications as they should be.
The students in this study believed that the World Wide Web was a great source of information for finding book reviews, biographical information, and historical information. The awareness of students that this information on the Web can be seen as positive as the Web can be an excellent source for these topics. Caution must be used however. With a few exceptions, most of these types of materials are not peer reviewed or checked for accuracy. Even the best sites often lack outside review and in essence they are little better than personal web pages from a scholarly perspective. Information in these types of sites is also easily subjected to manipulation by authors with political or religious agendas. Omitting information or slightly altering some "facts" can influence how a reader perceives an issue. For example, Turkish web sites on the status of Cyprus list different facts about the political status of Cyprus than do Greek web sites.
Biographical information on the Pope can vary depending on how an author views Catholicism. Not a single student talked about how this easy to find information on the Web may not be as reliable as information they find in traditional print material. They need to start thinking about this. The students at the multiplicity stage of Perry's Scheme may not care about the reliability of the information as they see all the opinions on the Web as equally valid.
Another finding of this study is that students look for spelling and grammatical errors when evaluating a web site. If they find them, the students are not finding the information to be credible. This is encouraging that students recognize this. As the example of the student who thought that the Kenyan government web site showed however, students need to be aware that the whole world does not use the same spelling and grammatical conventions that they are taught in school. British spellings of English words are not really misspelled. Students also need to be aware that the absence of grammatical and spelling errors does not alone indicate the information on a web site is acceptable for use in a school assignment. Some of the most well written web pages can be among the worst as far as the quality of the information is concerned.
Another problematic method of evaluation of web pages by the students is looking to the extension at the end of the URL of the web site. These, for example, are .edu, .com, .org, as well as many others. Several of the students believed that if a web site had .edu as the extension that a university produced it so it would be a scholarly web site. A few students also spoke that .org or .com meant that an organization or company had produced the web site and that meant it was a good place to gather reliable facts. Students are often taught to look at web extensions and use them to help evaluate the site. This method of evaluation can certainly give someone an idea of what type of organization, institution, or company authored a web site but it can do little to help verify the validity of the information on the web site. It also is yet another attempt by dualistic students in Perry's Scheme to find authority on the Web.
The .com and .org extensions cause problems for students because it is so easy for anyone to acquire the rights to use them. One web domain registration service, Great Domains, charges only $35 a year for the right to use a .com extension (xii). There are no restrictions on who may register. There is no requirement that a company or business actually exist behind the .com name. The same is true of the .org. The same company sells the rights to .org extensions for $30 a year. The text on the web site writes that the extension is recommended for non-profit related organizations. However, there is not a requirement that a nonprofit organization actually exist to use the .org extension.
Educational extensions also pose some problems for the students. The standards for acquiring a .edu extension are much more stringent. The granting authorities require that an educational institution exist. However, there are some questionable institutions that have managed to acquire the educational extension including many diploma mills that exist only to sell degrees. Further, many institutions allow their students to post their own web pages on the institutional server. This results in student personal web pages having .edu extensions. Again, there is little quality control from anyone on what the students put on their web sites and questionable, non-scholarly information can and does make appearances on these .edu sites.
The continuing growth of new domain extensions makes the process of evaluating web extensions even more difficult. For example, the government of Moldova has been assigned the extension .md. The Moldovans are selling these domain extensions to any one who will pay for them. Most of the buyers are individuals or companies in the health sciences who want to have .md at the end of their web pages. However, Moldova is not exercising any control over whether real medical companies and medical providers are buying this extension. Medical quacks and weight loss companies could buy up many of the .md extensions hoping that the .md extension will mislead people into believing they are real medical institutions, companies, or organizations. Invariably, without training, many students will begin to mistakenly believe that the .md extension is another sign of a good medical information site.
It is important that students begin to be taught to think critically about the extensions on web sites. They can help to determine what type of organization authored a site. However, the extension itself does not guarantee any accuracy in the information on the site. The only notable exception is .gov extensions for US federal web sites. This study demonstrates the need for teachers and librarians to talk with students about what web extensions really mean.
Perhaps the most troubling finding of this study is that these high schools students are using search engines to screen for quality. This is not surprising as students in the dualistic stage of Perry's Scheme are looking for authority on the World Wide Web and they see search engines as bastions of authority. Many of the students felt that if a web site was indexed by Yahoo that the information found on the web site was reliable. This is not true. Very few search engines screen for any level of quality. The search engines exist to help people find things on the Web and they try to be as comprehensive as possible. Virtually any web site will be listed in a directory if it has been submitted for inclusion in the search engine. Many of the search engines have automated spiders that search the Web for unindexed web sites to add to the search engine. The web sites are never checked for accuracy or quality.
Yahoo in particular was trusted by the students. Yet, Yahoo does not evaluate sites for anything other than where to place a site in the directory. From the Yahoo web page on submitting a web site, "The Yahoo! directory is organized by subject. Most sites in it are suggested to us by users. Sites are placed in categories by Yahoo! Surfers, who visit and evaluate your suggestions and decide where they best belong. We do this to ensure that Yahoo! is organized in the best possible way, making the directory easy to use, intuitive, helpful, and fair to everyone. (xiii) " There is little traditional quality control at Yahoo in regards to selecting web sites for inclusion in the directory. Instead, Yahoo checks for appearance, broken links, and in many cases a$199 fee for consideration.
Student's reliance on search engines as an indication of the quality of a site is dangerous. These students know they do not have the knowledge necessary to evaluate the information on a web site. Hence, they want someone else to do it for them. These students are using search engines and assuming that they are doing the evaluation when in fact they are not. Then the student mistakenly puts to much trust in the information found on an indexed web page. Librarians and others who teach these students how to search the World Wide Web need to make this point clear. So far, the students have failed to learn it on their own or from previous instructional sessions.
The most dangerous misinformation on the World Wide Web is on medical and science topics. Except for government and university sites, it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of the information. There is a lot of science and medical information on the Web from a large number of questionable web sites. The number of web sites selling cures for cancer or "disproving" evolution is high. The peer review system is especially important for medicine and science because lives are at risk. When the review system is taken away, it is almost impossible to accept any information of this type as valid. Yet a large number of students in this study were using the web to find medical and scientific information. This is another area that should alarm librarians.
Students have been taught to document what they find when doing research and include it in a bibliography with their papers. This has been translated by the students in the study into looking for bibliographies on web sites as a way of evaluating the information on the site. This is certainly promising as well. The quality of the items included on the bibliography can help in judging the information at the web site. Still, using this method to evaluate a web site has risks. Did the author actually read or use the information? It is possible prestigious publications may have been added to give legitimacy to the page even if they were really not used in writing the web page. Did the author understand what is cited? They may really have used the works in the bibliography but fail to grasp the intended meaning. Are the citations real? It is easy to fabricate an impressive sounding (and completely fake) bibliography with a little effort and creativity. Is the bibliography a list of web pages? If so, how does the student know if the web pages cited are any good? Looking at the bibliography of a web page can be helpful but it does not really establish the credibility of the information on the site. Looking to bibliographies can also be seen as another authority seeking behavior of dualistic students in Perry's Scheme.
Finally, this study found that many students judge the validity of a web site based on how elaborate it looks. If a web site looks good, appears to be professional, and has a lot of detail on it, many of the students will accept it as a good web site for information. Clearly, this method of evaluation is weak and not really helpful. Students must be taught to get beyond the appearance of a web site and consider instead the underlying information embedded within it. Some of the best information web sites are plain and not elaborate. Some of the worst look quite nice. This method fails completely in sorting this out.
Conclusions
This study revealed a variety of findings about how high schools students are using the World Wide Web for school assignments and how they are evaluating the information on web sites. Some of it is positive. Some of it is worrisome. High school students are still using libraries in conjunction with their Web research. The students know that the Web is a good place for current events and they tend to trust institutional web pages. They also know to examine web sites for spelling and grammatical errors and for the existence of a bibliography. They even think about the qualifications of web page authors. However, these students are wrongly using search engines and domain extensions to try to authenticate web sites. When it comes right down to it, the students in this study admitted they were not really sure how they could tell the difference between good and bad information on the Web. There is a real need to do a great deal of remedial instruction with high school students now and when they get into college to help them learn how to serve as a gate keepers of information on the Web. They also need to learn when to avoid the Web for information.
If students can be taught to use the Web in addition to libraries for appropriate purposes, these students will become excellent researchers with tools available to them that past generations could only have dreamed of. This study shows this as a real potential. As long as students do not mistakenly believe that the Web is superior to libraries for factual information, the future looks bright for these students. If however these students begin to prefer the unauthenticated parts of the Web for factual information, and they themselves begin to teach this to future generations of students, then it is possible that we sit at the beginning of an age of widespread information illiteracy. Knowledge will become relative and facts will be valued less with widespread consequences for society.
The World Wide Web has changed everything in regards to information. This revolution is in its infancy and it is understandable that high school students have trouble evaluating the information they find on the Web. No standard has arisen that allows for web information to be evaluated in the same way print materials have been in the past. Perry's Scheme of Student Development can be used to predict the confusion that high school students have about how to use the information that is found on the Web. High school students have clearly thought some on how to handle this problem. With a little guidance in the areas pointed identified in this study, students can really be educated to be good users of the information on the World Wide Web.
Endnotes
i Paul Solomon, "Children's Information Retrieval Behavior: A Case Analysis of an OPAC," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 44 (1993): 245-264; S. G. Hirsh, "How do Children Find Information on Different Types of Tasks? Children's Use of the Science Library Catalog," Library Trends, 45 (1997): 725-745.
ii Yasmin Kafai and Marcia Bates, "Internet Web Searching in the Elementary Classroom: Building a Foundation for Information Literacy," School Library Media Quarterly 25 (1997): 103-111.
iii Delia Neuman, "Designing Databases as Tools for Higher-level Learning: Insights from Instructional Design," Educational Technology, Research, and Development 41 (1993): 25-46; Diane Nahl and Violet Harada, "Composing Boolean Search Statements: Self-confidence, Content Analysis, Search Logic, and Errors," School Library Media Quarterly 24 (1996): 199-207.
iv Shu-hsein Chen, "A Study of High School Students' Online Catalog Searching Behavior," School Library Media Quarterly 22 (1993): 33-39.
v Frances Jacobson and Emily Ignacio, "Teaching Reflections: Seeking and Evaluation in a Digital Library Environment," Library Trends 45 (1997): 771-802.
vi Raya Fidel, "A Visit to the Information Mall: Web Searching Behavior of High School Students," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50, no. 1 (1999): 24-37.
vii Steve Baule, "Easy to Find but Not Necessarily True," Book Reports 16 (September/October 1997): 26.
viii Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, Bridging the Digital Divide: The Impact of Race on Computer Access and Internet Use, (Arlington, VA: ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 421 563, 1999).
ix William Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
x Baule, "Easy to Find but Not Necessarily True," 26.
xi Hoffman and Novak, Bridging the Digital Divide: The Impact of Race on Computer Access and Internet Use.
xii Great Domains Registration Site is located at http://web.archive.org/web/20020915115111/http://greatdomains.register.com/pricing.cgi.
xiii Yahoo! How to Suggest Your Site Page is located at http://web.archive.org/web/20020915115111/http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/.
Copyright (c) 2003, Michael Lorenzen. All rights reserved
Their Use of the World Wide Web for Research
Michael Lorenzen
The emergence of the World Wide Web has created another information resource for conducting research. The World Wide Web is a wonderful tool for individuals and organizations that want to reach large numbers of people. It is also a great resource for finding information on current events. However, the lack of traditional gate keeping that print material has used to filter information, such as editors and peer reviewing, is for the most part missing on the World Wide Web. This puts the users of the Web in the position of having to be their own gatekeepers of information. This has presented challenges in particular to students who are trying to find scholarly or factual information on the Web who are not necessarily able to evaluate the information they find. More bothersome is the fact that many students are not aware of proper methods of evaluating the Web and may not be aware that they need to do so.
A study was conducted in the Spring of 2000 of a group of high school students. The study consisted of interviewing students about how they used the World Wide Web to find information for school assignments. In particular, the students were asked how they went about finding information and how they knew if the information they found on the Web was scholarly or factual. It was hoped that the results of this study would help school, public and academic librarians understand how high school students use the Web in research. School and public librarians are dealing with this group now. Within a few years, all of the high school students in the United States will be of college age. This means that academic librarians will be dealing with Web evaluation skills of these students soon. By understanding how high school students evaluate the Web, it will help academic librarians prepare to deal with the research needs of the students. The results of the study indicated that while high school students are still using libraries, they are also using the Web and their ability to evaluate the information they find on the Web is weak.
There have been a variety of studies looking at how pre-college students use the World Wide Web and online library catalogs for finding information. Two separate studies found that elementary school students could use online library catalogs (i). If this age group can do so successfully, it is probably safe to assume high school students can as well. Another study found that elementary school students could also use the World Wide Web (ii). However, the researchers found that students had trouble constructing searches and with spelling. They also discovered that the students shied away from sites on the Web that did not contain pictures.
Two recent studies found that high school students lacked information-seeking skills (iii). Despite this, another study found that regardless of the quality of their search strategies, high school students still tended to find the information that they need for assignments (iv). Another study found that high school students had very clear criteria to tell the difference between bad and good web sites (v). Finally, another study found that the Web research behavior of high school students was good (vi). The researchers found that students were flexible in their searches and were quick to withdraw from bad searches. The students liked the Web because it had a variety of formats, it showed pictures, it covered a lot of subjects, and it was easy. They disliked web sites that were slow to load.
One writer noted that the major difficulty in the use of the World Wide Web by children was their inability to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information (vii) . Children valued an information site on the Web if it was easy to find and use. These same students did not take a lot of time to actually evaluate the site for accuracy. Finally, another study found that students of African-American backgrounds were less likely to use the Web for research because they were less likely to have an opportunity to gain access to the Web (viii).
Theories and Assumptions
The author based his theoretical framework for the approach to this study on Perry's Scheme of Student Development and the problems caused by the advent of the World Wide Web and the lack of an accepted system for determining the validity of information on it. Perry wrote that students in the first two stages of his scheme, which describes the vast majority of high school students, either seek out authorities to give them answers or see all viewpoints as equally valid (ix) . The nature of the Web, and the difficulty it presents in verifying information, means that students in the early stages of Perry's Scheme are going to have difficulty in using the Web appropriately.
Perry
Perry postulated that students go through four stages of development in their critical thinking skills. These are dualism, multiplicity, contextual relativism, and dialectic. As students move through these stages, they become more sophisticated critical thinkers. The students change their views about the nature of knowledge as they progress. Their view of authority changes as well and it impacts how they think about teachers and other sources of information.
The beginning level of Perry's Scheme is dualism. Students in this stage believe that all questions have definite right and wrong answers. They expect that the teacher will tell them what the right answer is and that their job as a student is to memorize this answer. These students also tend to accept what they read in books at face value if it is presented to them from an approved source like a textbook. The students do not see themselves as creators of knowledge and do not believe they are capable of determining what the right answer is on their own.
The second level of Perry's Scheme is multiplicity. At this stage, students believe that questions may in fact have multiple answers. However, they give all opinions the same weight because the students are unable to choose between competing opinions. To these students, everything is relative and knowledge is never certain. These students see the teacher as a guide through the variety of equally valid opinions.
The final two stages of Perry's Scheme are beyond most high school students and many undergraduate college students as well. These stages are contextual relativism and dialectic. In contextual relativism, students realize that opinions need support to gain validity. For example, the Nobel prize Committee does not give out the award for their opinion of a book's quality, but for its literary merit. In the dialectic stage, students can view problems from a variety of different viewpoints and recognize that best answers for questions depend on which approach the question is being asked from. The students take on roles of meaning makers and are capable of presenting unique looks on a question on their own.
World Wide Web
The nature of the World Wide Web makes it difficult for students who are in the first two stages of Perry's Scheme to use the Web effectively. The traditional print media made many of the decisions about the validity of information. The Web has lost this gate keeping function for information students are cast in the role of having to determine if something is true or not on their own. For students from dualistic or multiplictic views, this is hard to do successfully. An overview of the development of the Web can help to frame this idea.
The advent of the World Wide Web has been the most significant occurrence in the production and delivery of information since the invention of the Guttenberg printing press. The appearance of the printing press broke the hold of the church and learned societies to monopolize the process of deciding which books to copy manually and preserve in monasteries and estates. From then on, a printing industry emerged that allowed for a greater number of books. Further, these books were spread widely and were available to those who could afford them. A visit to a distant monastery was no longer required. In the same way, the existence of the World Wide Web is a revolution for information. Now, instead of the publishing industry deciding which writing gets published, the individual decides. Anyone with access to the Web with a little knowledge is now a publisher of any information they want to present. And anyone with access to the Web, with a little work, can find this information.
When the printing press was invented, it took several centuries for its full impact to be felt. For a long time, there were few printing presses and many still could not get their works to publishers. Further, books were expensive and only the well off could afford them. It was a long time before the average citizen could gain access to the new information world. This is not true with the World Wide Web. Within a decade of the emergence of the Web, its reach is nearly universal in western culture. The vast majority of households in the United States have a computer and the option of accessing the Web. Even the poor have access to computers and the Web in the United States if they visit a public library.
The difficulty in validating information on the Web has created a huge problem for seekers of information and scholars. There has not been enough time for the World Wide Web to develop a system of authenticating the information that is on the Web. True, invalid information did and does appear in printed material. However, there was always at least one level of gate keeping (and usually many more), that allowed interested and generally qualified individuals to pass judgment on whether the item should be published. While information still needed to be evaluated in the print media, an examination of the publisher or journal could often lend credible evidence to the information within a piece of print. The wonder of the Web is that this has been stripped away. And it may prove impossible to ever recreate this system Web wide. This is wonderful for democracy, but it is also a headache for those trying to verify the information at a web site.
The high school students of today have come of age in this new information revolution. From the time they started elementary school, the World Wide Web existed. Many of them were using the Web early in their school careers. They have difficulty imagining a time when they could not turn on their computer, surf the Web, and find information. It is as simple and as natural as it was for older generations of students to open up an encyclopedia or check the old card catalog for books on the topic. This is a profound difference in the way these students seek and view knowledge from every prior generation of humanity. And this new view, assuming something completely unexpected happens, will be the one that librarians and teachers will be dealing with from now on.
All of this has meant that the current group of high school students is the first generation to have to deal with such uncertainty in the validity of the information they find. Since the World Wide Web is still relatively new, teaching how to evaluate information on the Web is in its infancy. Educators, who often are less sophisticated than the students in their understanding of the Web, have had difficulty in teaching students how to evaluate what they find on the Web. The author believes that this has had consequences on the student's information evaluation skills. It was hoped that a study of high school students would reveal how students are using the to find information and how they are evaluating this information. If this is understood, it will be easier to understand the assumptions of high school and colleges students make towards the Web and help to better educate them towards the best use of the Web as an information resource.
Perry's Scheme for Student Development, while developed prior to the invention of the World Wide Web, can be used to understand the behavior of high school students and the Web. Dualistic students will use the Web to look for the one right answer to the question. They will seek authority so they can learn what this answer is. The variety of web pages will confuse them and they will looks for clues that a web site is indeed authoritative. They will have difficulty in determining which web sites have valid information and which ones do not. Students at the multiplicity stage will see the variety of opinions expressed on the many web sites as being equally valid. They may not see the need to filter information for quality as all web sites to them may be equally valid.
The author expected to find several things about high students and their use of the World Wide Web. The first was that high school students went to the Web as their primary information resource. The author believed that books and libraries were consulted only as a last resort or because the teacher who assigned homework forbade or restricted Web use. While all the students used the Web, the author was incorrect. The students used a variety of resources when seeking information including the Web and libraries.
One author had found that students preferred using the World Wide Web because it was easy (x). The author expected this attitude to show up in the interviews. It did not. The choice of questions asked did not really lend themselves to exploring this issue. Still, it was thought that the ease of Web use versus library use would be addressed by students. The lack of this response does not mean that students do not believe this. Many probably do and use the Web for this reason particularly if an assignment has been put off until it is almost due. However, this reason is not preventing students from using libraries or consulting books.
Librarians and scholars tend to accept knowledge because it has been examined and accepted by those who are qualified to judge it. Peer reviewed journals are the standard by which the academic and medical communities determine what is significant enough to publish and join the existing body of literature on a subject. Even books have a certain level of peer review embodied within them because editors and then publishers have to decide to publish them. The worst of writing usually fails to make it past this important gate keeping process. Even when bad material is published, it is generally easy to identify. The World Wide Web confuses this. It is harder to determine bad information on the Web if it is presented well and the apparent author/publisher appear credible. And no great peer review system has sprung up on the Web yet to mirror that which exists in the printed world.
The author believed that the students of today do not hold knowledge to this standard. They are unsure how to evaluate it and the evaluations they do make do little to screen out the best written of bad knowledge. Students look to see who wrote a page without realizing that the real credentials of the author may not be listed. Students looks to search engines to weed out bad web sites not realizing that few search engines do this. Students look for spelling and grammatical errors on pages not realizing that the worst of information may in fact be amongst the best written.
The author did find the other idea that he expected to find. It was believed that high school students have not developed adequate skills to evaluate the information that they find on the World Wide Web. The students are the pioneer generation forced to deal with the vast, unauthenticated resource before the Web has had time to develop a widely accepted standard of authenticity and before real meaningful Web evaluation skills are being taught to students. It is believed by this author that this has meant that students are weak at determining the validity of an information resources and that the students accept knowledge if it is on a neat looking and easy to access web page. This is what the author found in interviewing these students.
Methodology
Interviews were conducted with high schools students in the Spring of 2000. Most of the students (19 of them) attended the same private high school in the Lansing, Michigan area. The interviews conducted at the high school were tape recorded and later transcribed. In addition, another six students were interviewed at the Michigan State University Main Library and came from several local high schools. Parental consent for student participation was secured in advance when the students were minors. The students also signed consent forms. Both parents and students were promised confidentiality.
The students who were interviewed tended to come from similar backgrounds. All of the students were white. This may have an impact on the results of the study as previous research has found that African-American students have less access to the Web than white students (xi). This may effect the validity of the study with non-white students. Thirteen of the 25 students were in the 10th Grade. The other 12 were 12th Graders. Most of the students were female as well. Only 9 of the 25 students were male. This may also skew the study results towards the experiences of females in web use and web evaluation.
The students were asked the following questions:
1. Can you tell me your age and grade? 2. When you are given an assignment at school that requires you to look up information, how do you start your search for information?
3. What types of assignments are you likely to use the Web for?
4. How do you gain access to the Web?
5. What types of web sites would you use to find facts?
6. What types of web sites would you not use?
7. How do you know if the information on a web site is good?
8. How do you get help in finding information?
Clarifying questions were used with the students if the author believed they would be useful in soliciting additional information. Many of the students had difficulty in answering some of the questions and there were long pauses in the interview as they thought of answers.
Findings
The interviews were for the most part brief. The reason for this is that the students showed a great deal of hesitancy in answering some of the questions. They struggled to answer the questions and after a few moments would say a few sentences to move on to the next question. Some of the students gave longer, more articulate answers but it became clear that once we got beyond how the student looked up information and what topics they looked up on the World Wide Web, the students have given very little thought to how to evaluate what they found on the Web.
The author believed that some of the students might not have access to the World Wide Web and it might make it difficult for the student to answer most of the interview questions. As such, a question was added asking how the student accessed the Web. All of the students had access to the Web however. Most had access at home and at their school. A few even used the local public library to get on the Web. This is probably representative of most high school students in the United States. Although some students may not have access to the Web, these same students do not have to grapple with the question of how to evaluate the Web. As such the responses of the students in this study are for the most part probably typical of a large number of Web-using students.
Another clear response from the students was that they asked librarians or teachers for help when they got stuck when doing research. Another popular but less common answer was that family members and friends provided help. One girl said, "I ask my little brother because he is good at computer stuff." While this reliance on librarians and teachers for help sounds encouraging, the author believes this response may have been tainted. All of the students were told the author was a librarian. It seems to the author that many of the students were pleased to answer this question by saying they asked for help from a librarian. This may have been true but they may also have been telling the author in this instance what they believed the author wanted to hear.
When students were asked where they look up information for school assignments, two clear answers were given. Most of the students said they used both a library and the World Wide Web. A few students relied exclusively on the Web. None of the students relied exclusively on libraries. One student said, "I'll usually go to the school library, but sometimes I don't have time. Then I'll use the Internet at my friend's house sometimes because ours isn't hooked up right now. I'll either go to my friend's house or go to the local public library." Another student who didn't use libraries said, "Typically, I'll start either by one of two methods from the same location, a computer. I'll either go to an online encyclopedia or I'll use the Internet for obtaining information." A more library centric student responded, "I usually go to the library and go on one of the computers and see what kind of stuff I find. I prefer to use just books before going on the Web." It became clear that these high school students are using both the library and the Web to search for information for school assignments.
When asked what type of assignments they used the World Wide Web for, the students gave a variety of responses. History and current events were the most common responses by far. Said one student,
Probably assignments dealing with history or say a biography of a person or a current event. Certainly a current event type of an issue when what you need to write about it or explain it, it would be very useful. The Web would be very useful for that. Another student responded in a manner that reflected a wide scope, "Nightly assignments, stuff that is not extremely important and then anything that I have heard that there are web sites on the Internet to look for." In addition to current events and history, several other topics that were cited as being good to look up on the Web included biography, book reviews, and science. One student told the author that the Web was the best source of information on genetics. Also noted by a few students was that the Web was a good spot for information on computers and for finding maps.
The students were asked what type of web sites they used to find facts. This is the first of the questions to give many of the students pause. Over half of the students responded by saying that they used search engines to find sites with facts. Yahoo was mentioned the most often but other search engines such as Alta Vista and Dogpile were also cited. The second most common answer was web pages from "institution like places." Universities, libraries, museums, and government agencies were considered acceptable to many of the students for facts. News sites also were mentioned several times. Responded one student, "Newspaper web sites like USA Today, or going through Yahoo to search through and then to make sure the source is credible, go back to a newspaper or online scientific journal." Many students also felt that online encyclopedias (like Encyclopedia.Com and the online Britannica) were good spots. The web extension .org on a web site meant facts to a few students as did information found at America Online.
Students also wrestled with the reverse of the last question. They were asked what web sites they would avoid for finding facts. After a moment of hesitation, the most common response was personal web pages. The students did not trust a personal page because they believed anyone could put them up. Another popular choice was pornographic sites. One student pointedly told me, "I don't use porno pages because that would violate school policy."
While many of the students in the previous question used the extension .com to indicate good sites for facts, many of the students in this question cited .com's as sites to avoid. One student said, "I don't really like to use .com. I don't really know how well they are or how like truthful they are. I like to stick to educational ones and the government ones where the facts are at. I usually pick these before .com." Another student spoke similarly, "If it ends in .com there is a chance that it is not true, because .gov and .edu are more credible institutions." Other web sites to avoid according to the students were sites that had errors, were "outrageous", lacked a bibliography, or did not appear to have a copyright.
The students had the greatest difficulty with the question of how they knew the information on a web site was good. The most common answer was that the student did not know. Many of the students struggled with this question, gave the author a few tentative responses, and then said they did not know. The students also used the source or author of the information to determine if it was reliable. Said one student,
There is a bibliography to back it up, if it says who it is published by, if there is not any information on who wrote it or where it came from then I know its not going to be good. Well, it could be but it doesn't have anything so I am not going to trust it. Or if it is published by something I am familiar with and I know it has good information. Another student responded similarly by saying, "Usually it says like the national history foundation or things like that at the bottom of the page, or if from a library or has other links to libraries and things like that." Students also evaluated web site by the domain extension after the dot in the web address. Other criteria used to judge how good the information on a web site were how elaborate the web site was, if the information was believable, and whether or not the web site had a bibliography.
One special interview story is of note here. One female student told me she didn't ever use web sites that had spelling errors on them. She said,
I was doing a project and I thought I had a bunch of information about Kenya, and I thought it was really good and I was looking through it and found misspelled words. I didn't think it was fake information but I couldn't be sure it was factual. I think you can put up just anything. After the author turned off the tape recorder, the student wanted to talk some more about some of the questions. She wanted to hear the author's answer to some of the questions that were asked. She also told me more about the Kenyan web site she discounted because it had spelling errors. The student said that she was sure that the misspelled web page was an official Kenyan government web site about Kenyan National Parks. The author looked for this page and found it after finishing the interviews for the day. The "misspelled" words turned out to be British rather than American spellings of the words. For example, the spelling of honor as honour convinced her the page was not trustworthy.
Discussion
The findings of this study are a mixed bag for librarians and teachers. The students showed many positive habits towards their use of the World Wide Web. The use of libraries and the Web by students shows a level of sophistication that is promising. Students using the Web for current events and news sites, their trust of institutional web sites, and their avoidance of pornographic web sites for facts are all positive signals. Several other findings signal both positive and negative consequences. Students are trusting the Web for book reviews, history, and biographical information. The Web can be good for these but caution must be used. The students also give a lot of credence to whether a web site has spelling or grammatical errors on it. This is good but an absence of errors does not indicate quality. Students also look at the source and authorship of a web page, which is helpful, but they do not seem to grasp that this is easy to fabricate. Finally, students are having difficulty in evaluating the Web despite the positives noted above. Students mistakenly believe that search engines screen for quality. Students are inappropriately using web sites to conduct science searches. Students believe that certain domain extension guarantee quality when they do not. And they also give too much credence to how good or elaborate a page looks.
The finding that high schools students are still using libraries is not surprising. Print material and libraries are still valued by society despite the growth of the World Wide Web. The teachers who have given assignments to the students in the study still value the knowledge held in libraries. Many of these teachers are skeptical of the Web. This attitude has influenced the high school students in this study. This is undoubtedly happening throughout the western world. However, the students themselves like the Web and do use it for finding information. For them, the library and the Web are both equally valid locations for good information.
This use of both resources by high school students shows a great deal of research sophistication. Using a variety of sources for research has always been encouraged by librarians. The World Wide Web is an additional information resource that librarians want students to use. The difficulty that librarians have with the Web is the ease by which anyone can put up anything without the reader having any method of verifying it. Therein lies the potential drawback to this positive development. The information in libraries and the information on the Web are not equal. The information in the library has gone through levels of gate keeping. Most of the Web material has not.
Perhaps coupled with this still existent use of libraries is the respect students show web pages produced by institutions. Students are aware of the fact that they need to cite web pages that their teachers will find acceptable. And as this study showed, many students are aware of their own failings in evaluating the information on a web site as shown by the large number of "I do not know" response to how the student tells good from bad information on a web site. It is reasonable to assume that this leads many students to rely and trust institutional sites produced by universities, respected and well known organizations, and the government. This is also to be expected from dualistic students in Perry's Scheme who are looking for authorities to give them the right answer. It is still possible to be mislead by these institutions, but the reliability of the information on their web pages is seen as greater by the students. This is true and the fact that students have realized this is a good development.
One of the best uses for the World Wide Web is staying abreast of current events. Libraries simply can not compete with the Web for what is happening in the world today or the last several months. There is a lag in scholarly books and journals which keep the newest material libraries a year or more behind. There are a large number or reliable new sites on the Web that make it easy for students to find out what is going on around the world. By sticking to the main news services, many of whom exist in the print and broadcasting worlds as well, the student can be fairly certain the information presented has been screened for accuracy. And again, these sites would be reassuring to students who are dualistic in Perry's Scheme. It is wonderful that high school students have realized this and are using the Web for this purpose.
This study also showed that students are not using what they consider to be pornographic web sites to conduct research. The study does not suggest that high school students are not consulting these sites however. Many of the students are aware of the existence of these sites and many undoubtedly use them for non-research purposes. However, the students are not expecting to find scholarly or factual material there and avoid their use in conducting research. It is unlikely that their teachers would consider the use of these sites in an assignment acceptable anyway but the author believes the students have come to believe on their own that these sites are not good to use for research.
One positive and negative discovery of this study is that high school students are using online World Wide Web encyclopedias for finding facts. Two that were noted repeatedly by the students were Encyclopedia.Com and the online Encyclopedia Britannica. The students clearly recognize these sources as good locations to find facts. This is positive that the students recognize this. However, traditionally both high school and certainly college students have been told not to use encyclopedias when writing research papers except to get background material that is not cited. These two Web encyclopedias are virtually identical to the print encyclopedias that they are based upon. Why then do students feel they can use these resources in research? Do they feel that since the encyclopedia is now on the Web that it has been magically transformed into better information? Evidently teachers are accepting these resources as valid citations in high school papers if the students are using them. Why are the teachers doing this? Teachers should indeed encourage students to consult encyclopedias of any variety (print or Web) to get basic information but should be consistent in insisting that neither form is appropriate for citing. To do otherwise is to send students the message that information on the Web is superior to print material even if it is identical. That is an erroneous and dangerous message to send to students.
Another criterion being used by students when evaluating information on the World Wide Web is considering the authorship of the web page. This is also positive because this step alone can be the most useful in determining the credibility of information. Several students mentioned they look for degrees at the end of names. The students are thinking about the qualifications of the authors of web pages. The drawback to this is that students may not be aware that authorship of web pages is not always as advertised. Further, qualifications listed at a site may be fabricated or made to appear greater than they really are. Did the author really earn a Ph.D? If so, is it from a credible school and not a diploma mill? Even then, what is the degree in? Does this author's doctorate in education really qualify him to write about medicine? These questions would be asked by a publisher well before a book was published. On the Web, the student must ask this question. The students appear to be asking about authorship. However, they do not seem aware that their questions are not necessarily being answered by their evaluation criteria. Further, students from the multiplicity viewpoint in Perry's Scheme may not be as concerned about the qualifications as they should be.
The students in this study believed that the World Wide Web was a great source of information for finding book reviews, biographical information, and historical information. The awareness of students that this information on the Web can be seen as positive as the Web can be an excellent source for these topics. Caution must be used however. With a few exceptions, most of these types of materials are not peer reviewed or checked for accuracy. Even the best sites often lack outside review and in essence they are little better than personal web pages from a scholarly perspective. Information in these types of sites is also easily subjected to manipulation by authors with political or religious agendas. Omitting information or slightly altering some "facts" can influence how a reader perceives an issue. For example, Turkish web sites on the status of Cyprus list different facts about the political status of Cyprus than do Greek web sites.
Biographical information on the Pope can vary depending on how an author views Catholicism. Not a single student talked about how this easy to find information on the Web may not be as reliable as information they find in traditional print material. They need to start thinking about this. The students at the multiplicity stage of Perry's Scheme may not care about the reliability of the information as they see all the opinions on the Web as equally valid.
Another finding of this study is that students look for spelling and grammatical errors when evaluating a web site. If they find them, the students are not finding the information to be credible. This is encouraging that students recognize this. As the example of the student who thought that the Kenyan government web site showed however, students need to be aware that the whole world does not use the same spelling and grammatical conventions that they are taught in school. British spellings of English words are not really misspelled. Students also need to be aware that the absence of grammatical and spelling errors does not alone indicate the information on a web site is acceptable for use in a school assignment. Some of the most well written web pages can be among the worst as far as the quality of the information is concerned.
Another problematic method of evaluation of web pages by the students is looking to the extension at the end of the URL of the web site. These, for example, are .edu, .com, .org, as well as many others. Several of the students believed that if a web site had .edu as the extension that a university produced it so it would be a scholarly web site. A few students also spoke that .org or .com meant that an organization or company had produced the web site and that meant it was a good place to gather reliable facts. Students are often taught to look at web extensions and use them to help evaluate the site. This method of evaluation can certainly give someone an idea of what type of organization, institution, or company authored a web site but it can do little to help verify the validity of the information on the web site. It also is yet another attempt by dualistic students in Perry's Scheme to find authority on the Web.
The .com and .org extensions cause problems for students because it is so easy for anyone to acquire the rights to use them. One web domain registration service, Great Domains, charges only $35 a year for the right to use a .com extension (xii). There are no restrictions on who may register. There is no requirement that a company or business actually exist behind the .com name. The same is true of the .org. The same company sells the rights to .org extensions for $30 a year. The text on the web site writes that the extension is recommended for non-profit related organizations. However, there is not a requirement that a nonprofit organization actually exist to use the .org extension.
Educational extensions also pose some problems for the students. The standards for acquiring a .edu extension are much more stringent. The granting authorities require that an educational institution exist. However, there are some questionable institutions that have managed to acquire the educational extension including many diploma mills that exist only to sell degrees. Further, many institutions allow their students to post their own web pages on the institutional server. This results in student personal web pages having .edu extensions. Again, there is little quality control from anyone on what the students put on their web sites and questionable, non-scholarly information can and does make appearances on these .edu sites.
The continuing growth of new domain extensions makes the process of evaluating web extensions even more difficult. For example, the government of Moldova has been assigned the extension .md. The Moldovans are selling these domain extensions to any one who will pay for them. Most of the buyers are individuals or companies in the health sciences who want to have .md at the end of their web pages. However, Moldova is not exercising any control over whether real medical companies and medical providers are buying this extension. Medical quacks and weight loss companies could buy up many of the .md extensions hoping that the .md extension will mislead people into believing they are real medical institutions, companies, or organizations. Invariably, without training, many students will begin to mistakenly believe that the .md extension is another sign of a good medical information site.
It is important that students begin to be taught to think critically about the extensions on web sites. They can help to determine what type of organization authored a site. However, the extension itself does not guarantee any accuracy in the information on the site. The only notable exception is .gov extensions for US federal web sites. This study demonstrates the need for teachers and librarians to talk with students about what web extensions really mean.
Perhaps the most troubling finding of this study is that these high schools students are using search engines to screen for quality. This is not surprising as students in the dualistic stage of Perry's Scheme are looking for authority on the World Wide Web and they see search engines as bastions of authority. Many of the students felt that if a web site was indexed by Yahoo that the information found on the web site was reliable. This is not true. Very few search engines screen for any level of quality. The search engines exist to help people find things on the Web and they try to be as comprehensive as possible. Virtually any web site will be listed in a directory if it has been submitted for inclusion in the search engine. Many of the search engines have automated spiders that search the Web for unindexed web sites to add to the search engine. The web sites are never checked for accuracy or quality.
Yahoo in particular was trusted by the students. Yet, Yahoo does not evaluate sites for anything other than where to place a site in the directory. From the Yahoo web page on submitting a web site, "The Yahoo! directory is organized by subject. Most sites in it are suggested to us by users. Sites are placed in categories by Yahoo! Surfers, who visit and evaluate your suggestions and decide where they best belong. We do this to ensure that Yahoo! is organized in the best possible way, making the directory easy to use, intuitive, helpful, and fair to everyone. (xiii) " There is little traditional quality control at Yahoo in regards to selecting web sites for inclusion in the directory. Instead, Yahoo checks for appearance, broken links, and in many cases a$199 fee for consideration.
Student's reliance on search engines as an indication of the quality of a site is dangerous. These students know they do not have the knowledge necessary to evaluate the information on a web site. Hence, they want someone else to do it for them. These students are using search engines and assuming that they are doing the evaluation when in fact they are not. Then the student mistakenly puts to much trust in the information found on an indexed web page. Librarians and others who teach these students how to search the World Wide Web need to make this point clear. So far, the students have failed to learn it on their own or from previous instructional sessions.
The most dangerous misinformation on the World Wide Web is on medical and science topics. Except for government and university sites, it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of the information. There is a lot of science and medical information on the Web from a large number of questionable web sites. The number of web sites selling cures for cancer or "disproving" evolution is high. The peer review system is especially important for medicine and science because lives are at risk. When the review system is taken away, it is almost impossible to accept any information of this type as valid. Yet a large number of students in this study were using the web to find medical and scientific information. This is another area that should alarm librarians.
Students have been taught to document what they find when doing research and include it in a bibliography with their papers. This has been translated by the students in the study into looking for bibliographies on web sites as a way of evaluating the information on the site. This is certainly promising as well. The quality of the items included on the bibliography can help in judging the information at the web site. Still, using this method to evaluate a web site has risks. Did the author actually read or use the information? It is possible prestigious publications may have been added to give legitimacy to the page even if they were really not used in writing the web page. Did the author understand what is cited? They may really have used the works in the bibliography but fail to grasp the intended meaning. Are the citations real? It is easy to fabricate an impressive sounding (and completely fake) bibliography with a little effort and creativity. Is the bibliography a list of web pages? If so, how does the student know if the web pages cited are any good? Looking at the bibliography of a web page can be helpful but it does not really establish the credibility of the information on the site. Looking to bibliographies can also be seen as another authority seeking behavior of dualistic students in Perry's Scheme.
Finally, this study found that many students judge the validity of a web site based on how elaborate it looks. If a web site looks good, appears to be professional, and has a lot of detail on it, many of the students will accept it as a good web site for information. Clearly, this method of evaluation is weak and not really helpful. Students must be taught to get beyond the appearance of a web site and consider instead the underlying information embedded within it. Some of the best information web sites are plain and not elaborate. Some of the worst look quite nice. This method fails completely in sorting this out.
Conclusions
This study revealed a variety of findings about how high schools students are using the World Wide Web for school assignments and how they are evaluating the information on web sites. Some of it is positive. Some of it is worrisome. High school students are still using libraries in conjunction with their Web research. The students know that the Web is a good place for current events and they tend to trust institutional web pages. They also know to examine web sites for spelling and grammatical errors and for the existence of a bibliography. They even think about the qualifications of web page authors. However, these students are wrongly using search engines and domain extensions to try to authenticate web sites. When it comes right down to it, the students in this study admitted they were not really sure how they could tell the difference between good and bad information on the Web. There is a real need to do a great deal of remedial instruction with high school students now and when they get into college to help them learn how to serve as a gate keepers of information on the Web. They also need to learn when to avoid the Web for information.
If students can be taught to use the Web in addition to libraries for appropriate purposes, these students will become excellent researchers with tools available to them that past generations could only have dreamed of. This study shows this as a real potential. As long as students do not mistakenly believe that the Web is superior to libraries for factual information, the future looks bright for these students. If however these students begin to prefer the unauthenticated parts of the Web for factual information, and they themselves begin to teach this to future generations of students, then it is possible that we sit at the beginning of an age of widespread information illiteracy. Knowledge will become relative and facts will be valued less with widespread consequences for society.
The World Wide Web has changed everything in regards to information. This revolution is in its infancy and it is understandable that high school students have trouble evaluating the information they find on the Web. No standard has arisen that allows for web information to be evaluated in the same way print materials have been in the past. Perry's Scheme of Student Development can be used to predict the confusion that high school students have about how to use the information that is found on the Web. High school students have clearly thought some on how to handle this problem. With a little guidance in the areas pointed identified in this study, students can really be educated to be good users of the information on the World Wide Web.
Endnotes
i Paul Solomon, "Children's Information Retrieval Behavior: A Case Analysis of an OPAC," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 44 (1993): 245-264; S. G. Hirsh, "How do Children Find Information on Different Types of Tasks? Children's Use of the Science Library Catalog," Library Trends, 45 (1997): 725-745.
ii Yasmin Kafai and Marcia Bates, "Internet Web Searching in the Elementary Classroom: Building a Foundation for Information Literacy," School Library Media Quarterly 25 (1997): 103-111.
iii Delia Neuman, "Designing Databases as Tools for Higher-level Learning: Insights from Instructional Design," Educational Technology, Research, and Development 41 (1993): 25-46; Diane Nahl and Violet Harada, "Composing Boolean Search Statements: Self-confidence, Content Analysis, Search Logic, and Errors," School Library Media Quarterly 24 (1996): 199-207.
iv Shu-hsein Chen, "A Study of High School Students' Online Catalog Searching Behavior," School Library Media Quarterly 22 (1993): 33-39.
v Frances Jacobson and Emily Ignacio, "Teaching Reflections: Seeking and Evaluation in a Digital Library Environment," Library Trends 45 (1997): 771-802.
vi Raya Fidel, "A Visit to the Information Mall: Web Searching Behavior of High School Students," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50, no. 1 (1999): 24-37.
vii Steve Baule, "Easy to Find but Not Necessarily True," Book Reports 16 (September/October 1997): 26.
viii Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, Bridging the Digital Divide: The Impact of Race on Computer Access and Internet Use, (Arlington, VA: ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 421 563, 1999).
ix William Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
x Baule, "Easy to Find but Not Necessarily True," 26.
xi Hoffman and Novak, Bridging the Digital Divide: The Impact of Race on Computer Access and Internet Use.
xii Great Domains Registration Site is located at http://web.archive.org/web/20020915115111/http://greatdomains.register.com/pricing.cgi.
xiii Yahoo! How to Suggest Your Site Page is located at http://web.archive.org/web/20020915115111/http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/.
Copyright (c) 2003, Michael Lorenzen. All rights reserved
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