Article Review: How Research has Changed in the Digital Age

With the changing state standards in the social sciences, we are now expected to incorporate more aspects of reading and writing into our teaching. I work with 11th and 12th grade students and we are often unaware of the best ways to help our students achieve as writers, as this was not our area of expertise. This article in History Teacher describes how we can use digital media to help our students learn. It gives tips for how to teach students to do their own historical research. Given the age group I work with, I felt this was an appropriate thing to concern myself with.
Daniel states that “overall, historians have almost universally embraced basic computer technologies like word processors and library databases, but many remain wary of more sophisticated tools and have yet to delve into digital history” (p, 262). She spends much of her article Teaching Students How to Research the Past: Historians and Librarians in the Digital Age trying to find out why they are so hesitant to changing to a more modern type of research as well as how to best allow students to gain the skills needed to properly do digital research. Teaching improved research methods is applicable to NETS-S Standard 3: Research and Information Fluency.

Daniel begins by explaining how historians did their research before they were able to use digital sources. As a 25-year-old who has done most of her research with digital sources it was interesting to see how it was done before. Historians “prefer[ed] to follow footnotes in articles and books, to read book reviews or to consult their colleagues, or if their favorite sources fail, to browse the library shelves” (Daniel, 2012, p. 264). She states that in 2002 following leads and citations in printed sources was still the most favored method of doing historical research. In 2010 the American Historical Association stated “that use of online primary sources, while widespread, [was] still far from universal among historians” (Daniel, 2012, p. 265).
Today’s students are frustrated with the lack of guidance they receive when learning how to do research. Youth today are comfortable with finding information, but had difficulty ”integrating their information seeking practices into the broader research process and acquiring the critical reading and thinking skills that build good researchers” (Daniel, 2012, p. 265). Daniel is concerned that today’s students did not develop research skills from another era of research and thus are starting their research habits with digital sources. This means they are unfamiliar with the ideas of complex research which involves getting information from several sources and putting it into context on your own. Even if you were able to find it, often no one source would tell you everything you need to know in a way you could understand it.

Daniel states that students are comfortable with their search-engine skills, but that they need more than the ability to search for information. The problem with internet-research is not lack of information, but an overwhelming overload of often-irrelevant data. As such, the skills of “acquiring sufficient contextual information to narrow down a topic, identifying relevant and quality resources, and processing them” are what students need to learn today (Daniel, 2012, p.265).

Students in my history class often try to do the first of these items – acquiring sufficient contextual information to narrow down a topic – by quickly going to a website like Wikipedia and getting some background information. I’ve heard English teachers oppose this idea several times because they find that this site and ones like it are “full of inaccuracies”. I’ve not found this to be the case, and I promote them using Wikipedia as a way of learning enough background knowledge so that they can put their research into context. I don’t let them use it as a source however.
When students are asked to identify relevant and quality resources I find that they often don’t know what this means. The simplest way I know how to explain this concept to my students is to find the information you need to explain your topic, don’t just explain your topic based on the sources that you find with your subject written somewhere in the title. (If someone else knows of a better way to describe this idea – and there must be a better way – please mention it in the comments).

When it comes to process resources, I tell students to try to explain what you understand in your own words and style. Don’t try to rephrase what an author wrote in their paper – my students should have more information at their disposal. Combining multiple ideas should give the students a unique perspective. Again, if I were an English teacher I would have a better way to explain this to students. As it stands, I feel like our history classes have just become another place for students to experiment with writing, and that’s alright, they need the practice.
This article did not do a great job at explaining how to teach students to use digital sources well, which is what I had hoped it would do when I read its title (identifying relevant sources – it’s still a struggle for some of us). It did do a good job of trying to explain WHY students don’t know how to use digital sources well, and I definitely fell into that category when I was the same age as my students. The educators and administrators who decide how we teach our students didn’t grow up in the “Google Generation” like my students and I did. Their ideas on how research should be done are based on methods of research that we (for better or worse) rarely use anymore. By recognizing why our weaknesses lie where they are as well as some basic strategies for how to help improve them, I believe I will be able to help my students handle digital research better.

Daniel, Dominique (2012) Teaching Students How to Research the Past: Historians and Librarians in the Digital Age. History Teacher, Feb 2012, Vol. 45, Issue 2, p. 261-282.

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