No one ever called library research "Funk & Wagnalling" 20 years ago when students spent days, maybe even weeks, in the stacks at a local library chasing down the facts and figures for their term papers from the encyclopedia's various volumes.
Today, it's a fact of life that the first thing students do when tackling an assignment is go Googling, searching online for reports, magazine articles, blog posts and other material. At their fingertips is a world of information, available in an instant on cellphones, netbooks and iPads.It's as irresistible to a high school sophomore with a term paper due as it is to, say, a newspaper reporter on deadline.But troubling questions have arisen about this easy access to information.Educators and others worry that it may result in less learning because research may be more shallow and students may be less likely to retain information because it is accessible online. It's called the Google Effect.As with most information, students and teachers say it depends on what the researcher does with it."I can see where the studies are coming from, and in some ways I do agree," said Alex Pottorff, 17, a senior Advanced Placement student at Crowley High School who plans to be a pre-med major in college. "At the same time, I feel that having easier access to information can give you more depth in your own work. ... There's more information available and you can search deeper."Classroom teachers' opinions are mixed."I think there is a reliance on the ability to grab information quickly," said Michael Mundt, an AP coordinator and former AP teacher at Crowley High. "Does this challenge learning in depth? It's cause for concern, but I'm not really sure I've seen that."Marc Schwartz, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the South West Center for Mind, Brain and Education, said that the Internet may be rewiring how research is done but that learning is influenced more by teachers in the classroom."I had to memorize Martin Luther King's famous 'I Have a Dream' speech in school," Schwartz said. "I don't think memorizing a speech is a necessary step to understand the message, why it's important or why we need to keep coming back to that message."That's still the teacher's responsibility."Transitive memoryQuestions about the Google Effect have been around for years. But a study published in Science last year suggests that with the advent of the Internet and the use of search engines like Google and Bing, people no longer make extensive efforts to find out the things they want. In essence, we forget things we are confident can be found on the Internet, the study suggests.The paper, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips," says the Internet is now a primary form of what psychologists call transitive memory, or externally stored memories that people know when and how to access."Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things," Betsy Sparrow, one of the authors of the paper and a researcher at Columbia University in New York, was quoted as saying when it was released."Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker," she said. "We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found."Sparrow rejects the idea that Internet users are becoming lazy or dull. People are becoming more intelligent over time, she said: Just look at the rewriting of IQ tests to make them more complex."Memory isn't just remembering special details. It's understanding the association between things," Sparrow said in an interview last summer. "A very simple way of looking at memory is thinking of it as just being able to memorize things and regurgitate the facts. There's so much more to it than that."The transition to the Internet as the first source for information is an adaptive process, Sparrow said."There may be more information now that we look up quickly online when if we looked inside our brains we could find it," she said. "But it's not that different than the transitive sources we've always used as external memory sources."It just seems that much more scary in some ways, the idea that we're locating everything we learn outside ourselves."'Shallow research'Mundt, the Crowley educator, said that "a reliance on shallow research" is a bigger issue with students, no matter the research method."They'll take the easiest way out and go for the first thing on the menu," he said.Often that is Wikipedia, which calls itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Mundt requires students who go there to look at the footnotes on source material and go to the original sources.Even a high-performing student like Pottorff, a member of the school debate team, says she uses the site."I'm in debate, and whenever we get a new topic, I first go to Wikipedia to get a general understanding of it," she said. "I will never put 100 percent trust in it, and I would never quote Wikipedia in a paper."But I do feel it can be a good place to get a general idea and it has a lot of footnotes to lead you to more respectable sources," she said.Pottorff's most frustrating online experience? Looking up a biology question and finding a different answer on every site she accessed, she said.Grapevine High senior Mallory Harwell, 18, said she uses the Internet "very few times" for serious research. Harwell, an AP student, says she is an old-school library researcher who stays close to proven academic sources."I'm pretty old-fashioned," she said. "My friends will Google anything for a source, and to me it looks like a student website or something."Most of her teachers accept Internet sources, but Harwell said she doesn't retain the material as easily when cutting and pasting notes from the Internet."Copying it down by hand helps you remember it more," she said. "Also, you have to spend a lot more time trying to validate the Internet sources like Wikipedia than if you find traditional sources that are already validated."Teachers' viewTeachers say they embrace technology for research, though their preferred sources vary.Sarah Menn teaches AP English at Byron Nelson High School in the Northwest district, which equipped all its campuses with netbooks for each student three years ago."We really try to steer them away from Wikipedia from the start," Menn said. "I teach juniors, so by the time they get to me and I give them the Wiki speech, they say, 'I know, I know.'"With netbooks, research can be conducted in class anytime, she said, and teachers don't need to schedule library time or reserve computers."These kids are digital natives," said Brittany Harper, who teaches pre-AP English to freshmen at Northwest High School. "They use the netbooks for research, taking notes, for their papers. My students just created their own poetry anthology websites."Harper said she has seen no Google Effect from her students, who have likely never processed information any other way."We use it to teach our kids how to think," she said. "They're growing up with the technology and we have to teach them with the technology. It's what you do with it after they get the information that really matters."Students are required to use only databases from the school librarian's website, Harper said. The Northwest district uses the online Gale Virtual Reference Library as a preferred source."These are scholarly articles and credible sources, and once they [students] find their material, they must study it to answer an analytical prompt," Harper said. "They can't argue their thesis statement without analyzing it."Heather Cato, who teaches eighth-grade English and language arts at Cross Timbers Middle School in Grapevine, says she has seen a beneficial Google Effect in her classroom, which uses digital tablets."I've found that a lot of times kids who are Googling things are actually reading more about the subject," she said. "If you pick up an encyclopedia, you read one entry on the subject and you're done."Cato lets students check Wikipedia and follow its footnotes. She also teaches online citizenship: the responsibility that they, too, are contributing to the Internet's body of work on any given subject."I encourage my students to be real-world researchers, because when they leave my classroom, that's where they're going to go," Cato said.Shirley Jinkins, 817-390-7657Twitter: @startelegramHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
