They look for secondary sources of support, doing a second or third query to gain other perspectives on their topic. So good searchers actively seek out information that may conflict with their preconceived notions. It is easy to do a search that plays into your confirmation bias-your tendency to think new information supports views you already hold. In many ways, search engines make our metacognitive skills come to the foreground. So a search for proof of wrongdoing by a political candidate can return sites that purport to have this information, whether or not the sites or the information are credible. And although searchers look for true answers to their questions, the search engine returns results that are attuned to the query, rather than some external sense of what is true or not. It is the way we find the phone number of the local pharmacy, check on sports scores, read the latest scholarly papers, look for news articles, find pieces of code, and shop. The name of the country changed at least six times in a century, but she never realized that because she only read the answer presented on the search engine results page.Īsking a question of a search engine is something people do several billion times each day. If she had clicked through to the linked page, the girl probably would have started reading about the history of the Belgian Congo, and found out that it has had a few hundred years of wars, corruption, changes in rulers and shifts in governance. And it is not just students many adults share these difficulties. universities are not able to determine if a given web site contains credible information. For instance, the scientists found that 80 percent of students at U.S. In fact, a 2016 report by Stanford University education researchers showed that most students are woefully unprepared to assess content they find on the web. Students often do not have a great deal of background knowledge to flag a result as potentially incorrect, so they are especially susceptible to misguided search results like this. Double checking and going deeper are skills that come only with a great deal of practice-and perhaps a bunch of answers marked wrong on important exams. We Google researchers know this is what many students do-they enter the first query that pops into their heads and run with the answer. She did not realize that there is a deeper history here. The deep problem here is that she blindly accepted the answer offered by the search engine as correct. Knowing which city was the capital during which time period is complicated in the Congo, so I was not terribly surprised by the girl’s mistake. The capital of that former country was Boma until 1926, when it was moved to Léopoldville (which was later renamed Kinshasa). She happily copied the answer into her worksheet.īut the student did not realize that the Democratic Republic of Congo is a completely different country than the Belgian Congo, which used to occupy the same area. She reasonably searched and in less than a second she discovered that the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is Kinshasa, a port town on the Congo River. She was trying to find out which city was the capital of the Belgian Congo during this time period. I watched in dismay as a young student slowly typed her query into a smartphone. One of us (Russell) was there to help the students with their online research methods. In a cheery, sunshine-filled fourth-grade classroom in California, the teacher explained the assignment: write a short report about the history of the Belgian Congo at the end of the 19th century, when Belgium colonized this region of Africa.
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