Scholarly Article #3

Jansen, Barbara A.  “Relieving the Confusion:  Location and Access Made (Relatively) Easy.”  Library Media Connection  Apr/May (2005): 29-30.

Reading through the discussion write ups on periodicals I was happy to read Donna’s statement “It takes me a long time to find just the right article that I want to use; sometimes I feel overwhelmed in the searching process.”  I have often felt this way when I research databases for some of my courses, especially when I’m sporadic in my use of the library. 

This made me think if adults supposedly are having problems what about younger elementary students searching.  I began wondering if I could make it simpler and perhaps get some additional ideas I could pass on to the students.

Jansen in the article speaks about student’s levels of cognitive ability at ages 9 -12 to follow the multistep process of finding a resource, spell words correctly when searching and being overwhelmed when getting results of a search by the vast numbers of articles.  She also mentions kids having had little experience reading non fiction which makes reading for information difficult for them.  She talks about easy access to sources by making links available and putting books on reserve to for specific topics.  When this is done, time is then available to teach skills to access information in the sources.  

For Upper elementary students accessing databases such as Searchasaurus, Proquest, and others she mentions exploring the best search terms for the topics the students are working on and try to vary the search to see the research coming through.  Another strategy is to help students make a list of related keywords for their topics as well as words that may have been used in their books or the site.  

Another suggestion which I have not used before is to use the Find ...Edit feature on the browser when an article has been located on the database and input the keywords and related words in Find, which brings up more related articles to their topic, and may be less stressful for the students.

Jansen provides some good reminders about strategies to make the information gathering process less of a burden so students can focus on finding the information within the source they’ve found, whether book or database article.  Often we don’t spend as much time on skills which save students time finding information such as looking for keywords in the text, scanning the topic sentences and captions for  information they need.  As Jansen says these are important skills we can help teach students in the earlier elementary years and build on even if the process isn’t internalized till they are older.

I don’t agree with Jensen about students not being able to read non fiction information text for I know within my school and many others in the district we are working hard using Adrienne Gear’s non fiction strategies to help students understand non fiction text.  I also see the interest in non fiction material that is signed out by students on a daily basis.

The information which I found really interesting was the Find Edit functions which I have not had time to try yet.  If this works as well as Jensen says and limits the results, I will be using this fuction both for myself and with the students it can save us all a great deal of time sorting through the results.