Why My Students Use Wikipedia

 Wikipedia has become the bugbear of teachers at many schools when it comes to student use of the internet for research.  When I started at my present school in 2009, it was obvious that my students were unlikely to give up using Wikipedia simply because we wanted them to.  The solution, I decided, was to convince them that they should not reference it and that it should only be used as a jumping off point in their research.  On our libguides, I made sure that students always received the following advice:

School Policy on Wikipedia:  Read for background but do not cite!

Rule No. 1:  Use Wikipedia as a starting point for your research, but don't cite it unless you can exhaustively demonstrate that it is the only authoritative source on a particular issue.

Unfortunately, a few students decided that the policy meant that they could use the information from Wikipedia but that they didn’t need to reference it.  Thus we added rule 2 and 3:

Rule No. 2:  Re: Rule No. 1:  That doesn't mean that you should use the information from Wikipedia anyway and just not cite it.  It means that you should find other research sources.  Encyclopedias are only meant as starting points!  For example, you could find the bibliography in the Wikipedia article and look at the sources that the author of the article used.  You could also look to see if there is a list of links.  Check those out as well.

Rule No. 3:  If you are unsure, ask your teacher or librarian!

Over the years I have become a more sophisticated user of Wikipedia.  Furthermore, I have carried out my own research into Wikipedia and its use in academic research.  I can’t say in what order any of this happened.  However, I have recently come across a number of university libguides which include information and videos on the use of Wikipedia for research; and I have used them with my senior students.

Below is an example of a video from the University of New Brunswick in Canada

 

I have also taken on board some of my own observations to improve how I carry out research.  Initially, I read an article for background and then checked out the references and the links.  Later, I realised that the articles often gave me search terms I could use in furthering my search for information sources.  Finally, it wasn’t till I discovered Mike Canfield and SIFT, and later the Civil Online Reasoning course from Stanford that I realised Wikipedia’s value in fact checking sources.  

And now for the ‘more’. We tell our students not to use Wikipedia and yet many teachers seem happy to accept websites which might be judged as equally or more dubious. From a recent history assignment, I found the following:

1. https://www.history.co.uk/ :  a website originating in the United States and created by the Arts and Entertainment Network

2. https://www.biography.com/ :  also from the Arts and Entertainment Network

3. https://www.ducksters.com/ :  Little detail is given on the authors of the information on this website.  In their defence they do give a works cited list for some of the articles.  However, in the geography section the information source for Taiwan is over 10 years old. 

There are many websites, which student researchers come across which fall into the same category as those above. I have started to include a list of such websites on our libguides (see example below). I am hoping that teachers will also include them on the task sheets they prepare for any research assignment.

MYP and Research Skills

 A few weeks ago I facilitated a discussion on zoom about research skills in the MYP.  Though I had hoped for co-presenters, no-one stepped forward so much of the hour was taken up with me talking about what my IT integrationist colleague and I have started to do at our school and our future plans.  This is meant as an introduction to the recording of that session.

I have been working somewhat haphazardly over the last few years on teaching research skills to my MYP students and in developing a scope and sequence and learner outcomes for some of these skills.  I say haphazardly because, despite being a fairly effective researcher, it has taken me some time to come to an understanding of what skills beginners require, how to teach them and how to go about scaffolding those skills over a number of years so that students eventually develop into confident, effective researchers.

The covid pandemic lockdowns gave me an opportunity to step back from the hurly-burly of school life and take a good look at my practice and the needs of my students.  First, I came to the conclusion that I needed to upskill.  I needed to be better than my students and I also needed to be able to confidently meet them where they’re at.  

I know that we would all like our students to use our databases as the first ‘go to place’ in their research but that usually doesn’t happen.  Truthfully, it is rare that I start there either.  They are google and Wikipedia users first, a fact I had to learn to work with.  I was an adequate user of google but that wasn’t good enough so I looked first on their site for any courses or tips they might offer and from there was led to the edX courses on Power Searching and Advanced Power Searching of Google.  This was a turning point for me.  Not only did I increase my skill level but I learned how to better strategise my searches.  I learned the value of google scholar and google books in searching for sources for my diploma students and now encourage them to start there before diving into JSTOR and other databases we have access to.  I discovered the value of having an account in Researchgate so that I could request free PDFs of articles from their authors.  I learned how to dig around for PDFs of articles which I was unable to access through our resources, by hunting through the various versions of an article in google scholar.  The fact is I learn more with every search I do.  

And what about Wikipedia?  More about that in a later blog.

Now how to go about teaching some of this to students!  After a number of false starts and less than successful tries with grade 9s (see earlier blog posts for reflection on my failure) I came to the obvious conclusion, though not obvious to me initially, that I had to start at the beginning.  In this case that was at the beginning of MYP, and that was grade 6 and not grade 9.  That isn’t to say that I wasn’t going to work on certain research skills with other grades but that I was going to start to create a scope and sequence for research with grade 6 and refine it throughout the year by continuing to work on those skills in various subject areas.  Then I would move with them into grade 7, further developing what they needed to know there.

But what did they need to know and what would be classified as research skills?  This is where my collaboration with the IT Integrationist became so invaluable.  He was new to our school and as we started chatting I realised that he was having one of the same problems I had encountered when I started - not being able to get invited into the classes.  I invited him to come into a science class with me when I was working with them on research in forensics.  And to paraphrase Bogart, this was the beginning of a beautiful ‘collaboration’!

In one of our post-mortem sessions, we asked the question: what do students need to know to be successful in this project.  We recognised that there may be other skills in other projects, but this was our starting point.   Over the course of a number of discussions we decided on the following:

1. Organisation (and Planning)

2. Questions and Questioning

3. Source literacy

4. Searching/Researching

5. Source evaluation

6. Note taking 

7. Referencing and academic integrity 

In the meanwhile, I had started on a list of learner outcomes for search engine skills which should be achieved by the end of grade 10; and a scope and sequence for academic integrity and referencing, and how that would be integrated into the units through grades 6 to 10.  Both are as yet unfinished but we hope to complete them at an upcoming curriculum writing session.  That will just leave us with the other areas of research skills for next year.

For all of this to work, we recognised that one or two people trying to integrate these skills and reinforce them throughout the curriculum just wasn’t going to work!  We had to get the teachers involved to the point where they could and would take ownership of part of it.  Since this would require that many of them upskill in some areas, we decided to survey them to assess where the training was needed.  Now that we have the results, we can plan how to go ahead with our training sessions during pre-planning and throughout the upcoming school year.

So here we are.  We have a plan for implementation; we have a better understanding of what teachers and students require; we are continuing to write learner outcomes and a scope and sequence for research and referencing; and until the units of study are changed, we know in what units we will teach various skills in grade 6 to 8.

For a copy of the slide presentation, and other documents which accompanied the original zoom discussion, please contact the author through the comments section with your email address or via the Facebook group IB Librarians.