How quickly do you click on a link when your search results pop on the screen? How quickly do your students “click?” If your experience is like mine, students have already clicked off the page before I have finished looking at what is there. (Many of my younger colleagues do the same.) Often students will click on the first link that “kind’a” looks good without really looking at the description and the source.
The New Literacies group terms this skill: Locating Information Using Search Engines. This is similar to helping students understand what type of resources they should look in to find certain types of information. For example, use an almanac if you want to find the average rainfall in Tanzania. Try an encyclopedia to get an overview of a topic. Search Engines make the search task so much easier to find information, while simultaneously, making it more difficult to find the exact information you want.
The new reading research skills that students need involves understanding how search engines report out search results. Which sites have paid for their location on the page? What does the url tell us about the type of site it is and whether the site creators are trying to sell something. Taking these extra steps to preview and evaluate search results takes additional time just as previewing a textbook chapter takes extra time; however, it is time well spent for it may well save time in the long run. The best way to teach this to students may be conducting mini-experiments by giving students a question to answer and seeing which approach results in the answer most quickly. Unless students can see that taking a minute to look through search results to find the best possible sources will actually save them time, I doubt they will move from “click click .. click.”
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