As part of a project aimed at finding out how far children could successfully cope with tasks involving
reading, Cole and Ga,..·dner (1979) observed students' location
of information resources. They say that se arching often
appeared to be a random sampling of books from the shelf rather than a purposeful inquiry. This was despite the fact that most students could e xplain the theory o f using a libra,..·y system. Rudduck and H opkins (1984) made similar comments about sixth form students and Moore (1988)
observed the same gap between theory and practice among 1 1 year olds.
The project work set for the Cole and Gardner study was extremely well supported, t o the extent that students had many discussion sessions and a booklet of questions to help gui de their work. Teaching staff had also written te:·�t fo,..· them with the aim of leading them to lib"" ary r esources,
and had even selected a shelf of relevant books. Cole and
Gardner found that in this context few students a c tually
searched the library for information. They went straight
to the "p"" oject shelf" but used very few of the res ou",·ces. They clearly preferred the more concise teacher-written mate"" ials but these f ailed in thei,..· purpose of p""ompting fu,..·the ... · infor'ma ti on seeking.
The students in Moo""e's (1988) study frequently
expressed a preference for using a shelf of encyclopaedias containing concise information rather than searching the main collection. Since i n this c a s e they we"" e denied
access to e n cyclopaedias, t h e y h a d t o search the shelves. It was found that their interpretations of subject index cards and lack of understanding of shel ving conventions frequently hindered location of books. For example, a third of the students were u�aware that books are shelv e d top to bottom on adjacent units, not along one continuous shelf
after another. Many students con sequently had difficulty
knowing where to look when they reached the end o f a shelf. In a ddition, mis-inte ... ·p ... ·etation of Dewey numbe ... ·s "" estricted some students' field of search, for instance,
some thought that 5 98.2 m eant there were just two books o n the shelf!
With regard to selecting individual books, Moore found that childr-en relied heavily o n titles and cover
illustrations. In a few c a s e s books were totally r e jected i f their titles did not contain a keyword from the student's
question. Kobasigawa (1983) found that 70% of 9 year aIds
and 50% of 13 year- aIds s elected materials on a similar basis.
Phases of the inform a tion retrieval process o v erlap and s e lection of information sources cannot be done without reference t o some sort of evaluation of t heir conte-nt. It is to this t o pic that we now turn.
Evaluation of information sources
As discussed in the previous chapter, evaluation in t h e context of compreh ension occurs on m a n y levels (Baker,
1985). While those levels are critical to infor-mation
retrieval and use, that o f greatest concern here is evaluation of resource r elevance to the question driving
infor-mation seeking. Ir-ving (1981) has said that this part
of information retrieval is the most difficult for- p e ople of all ages but there do not s e e m to be any studies
e:-:clusively concern e d with how children far-e on the task or
even how they approach it. One must piece together
fragments of studies to get an overview.
For- e:-(ample, Moor-e's (1987b) study found that some 10 year olds were willing to e v a luate books on the b asis of the cover alone. In a task demanding classification of books by subject, 25% of the students opened no books a t all, while a further 2 5 % d i d s o only after striking a
difficulty and being questioned as to what they could do t o learn mor-e about a particular- b o o k . L o oking inside books was little help to these and some of the remaining children. One student flicked through the pages s o fast they could not be read while anoth e r looked at every page s lowly a n d delib er-ately without reading anything other- t h a n a list o f illus trations, a n d others c l e a r-Iy lacked purpose in their
perusal of texts. In c ontrast, s i;.� of the 25 children
observed seemed to have developed efficient strategies for
accessing information for subject evaluation. They used
cover notes, contents pages, indexes, pictures and sampled text before making an evaluation. It appears from this that the st uctures designed t o give access to information are also used in evaluating content and presumab l y the relevance of a text t o student inquiry. However, Cole and Gardner (1979) observed that students rarely use these aids in the course of project assignments. Further, they report that in general "the first book which contained something that COLtld be noted s e,..·ved the pupils' need"
(pI74). They suspect that students we,..·e actively searching f or anything they could use, rather than for a solution to thei,..· p a,..·ticular information p,..·oblem. In contrast, only one 11 yea,..· old in Moore's (1988) study failed to use the
available access structu,..·es to assess book content, although evaluation of texts was not necessarily more successful as a result.
Use of b ook access structures is not as easy as it appea,..·s in theory. Heather (1984) examined the difficulties inherent in their use, only to find that many students do not know the difference between tables of contents and indexes and do not understand the relationship of
dictionary and encyclopaedia guide words to the text on the page. Moreover,
�
iller (1980) came to the conclusion that it c6uld not be stressed too strongly that using an index is a labo,..·ious task for many children, partly because indexes in children's books tend to be of a low standardwith many omissions and errors. To make matters worse,
some non-fiction volumes d o not have indexes, others lack contents pages and still others d o not have page numbers
(Moo,..·e, 1988)! The nature o f the te!·:t further complicates
matters in that it is often loosely structured and headings are not always consistent with the content of the text
that follows (Anderson & Armbruster; 1982). Thus the
natu re of the materials contributes to the difficulty of
on the finding that children are often distracted by illustrations or an item of personal interest and lose sight of the information problem they are trying to solve (Lunzer & G a r dner, 1979).
In the majority of investigations of studying and project work, the texts have been pre-selected but many teachers do not support independent project work in this way and Rudduck and Hopkins (1984) note that si:<th form students are often expected to find materials for
themsel ves i n several curriculum areas. Within a given subject Rudduck and Hopkins found that these students may evaluate books in terms of size alone because "you carry them around with you in -your bag and they don� weigh you down" (p35)�
With regard to the wider context of resource
evaluation, co gnitive r-esear-ch s u ggests that children lack the e:-:ecutive contr-ol abilities to pr-edict task difficulties and to recognise changing levels of difficulty (Ander-son Ar-mbruster, 1 9 82). This has ser- ious implications for- their ability to select books matching their reading ability and assuming an a ppr-opr-iate level of pr-ior knowledge. Indeed, Br-own, Ar-mbruster and Baker (1984) state quite clearly that novice readers have trouble distinguishing between easy and di fficul t te>:ts.
In the course of trying to evaluate ma terials for relevance t o their research question, students are b ound to b e gin processing information in terms of concept
formation and getting an overview of the topic. Part of
this task is carried out covertly but at a later stage the process becomes mor-e overt with note-taking, outlining and
other study t echniques being a pplied. Evaluation and
extraction o f relevant information may occur simultaneously and will b e considered toge ther in the following section.
Extracting relevant information
As outlined �arlier, this phase of in for-mation re trieval demands that the student direct attention to important points and su pporting detail relevant to the question to be
answer-ed (Reynolds & Shir-ey, 1988). Cole and Gardner- (1979) found that for many children talking in a group was
essential to this process and at later stages was a
substitute for- reading as well as prompting memory, gaining text suggestions and providing the opportunity to rehearse written prose. Thus the presence of a group may affect information retrieval and use and consequently the use of books by a group of students may differ from that of
indi vidual s.
In the conte:<t of working alone, I<obasigawa (1983)
studied children's use of tables of contents and indexes to narr-ow the field of search within a book. Asked to provide keywor-ds and to identify chapters relevant to a given
question, it was evident that many 9 year' aIds did not use their gener·al knowledge to -limit the search. However, this could be prompted by handing the children the book opened to the table of contents. When e:':plicitly asked in this situation to identify three relevant chapters younger students performed as well as 13 year aIds. The implication being that more direction and str-ucture is needed to enable 9 year aIds to identify which parts o f a book are worth sear·ching for' relevant information.
It is also worth re!;alling I<obasigawa, Lacasse and MacDonald's (1988) findings that searching is straight for-war'd only when the questions driving information
r'etr'ieval indicate what s p ecific sections of a book should be searched. They found that the percentage of students spontaneously using headings to aid information searching increased from 42% of 9 year aIds to 75% of 13 year' aIds. However', efficient use of headings declines when te:<t and questions do not have k e ywords in common.
Overt extraction of relevant information often takes the form of taking notes o r engaging in other s tudy
techniques. Detailed e:<amin ation of these is outside the scope of the pr'esent study but brief mention will be made in order to keep the entire information retrieval and use process in view. Note-taking depends on student ability to identify important points, yet it seems to be generally
agreed that where complex prose is the subject of study, children have difficulty recognising these and require help in focusing attention on relevant information (Baker l!<
Brown, 1984b). Further-, al though most college students c a n s e l e c t important points for a summary, t h e y fail to include all the points judged important by researchers <Ga rner, 1988>.
In the wider context of information retrieval, Sheingold (1987) reports on one study of note-taking in which it was found that the information noted by students bore little relation to the problem they were asked to solve and similarly, the solutions they offer-ed were only indire ctly
related to the notes taken. There appeared to be
insufficient overall plan coo,..-dination and moni tor-ing.
Further-, Lunzer- and Gar-dner (1 979) noted that 10 t o 1 5 year old students often trans ferred information directly from the textbook to their notebooks, using strategies that maximized short term memory and by-passed the need for
r-eflection. Indeed, they state that reference books wer-e
often treated as "treasure troves of sentences a n d paragraphs that could b e stolen and marketed a g a i n i n another setting".
This finding is indirectly suppor-ted by results from Brown and Day's (1983) s tudy of summar-ization. Her-e it was found that 10 year olds could accurately delete trivial and redundant material from a text passage but almost never invented a topic sentence capturing the gist of a text. Even 15 year- olds failed to invent topic s entences in many cases and college students only did so for half the
occasions it would be a ppropriate. Brown and Day s t a t e that invention o f topic sentences is a skill u s e d with f a cility by e:<per-ts but - is most difficult for novices. It
seems to rest on a_bilities to identify and integrate important points but Winogr-ad and Br-idge (1986) have
ob served that resear-cher-s s till do not really understand how fluent readers achieve this.
Having gathe,..-ed information and partially pr-ocessed it, the student must now process it more thoroughly and begin
to structure the topic in ways appropriate to the criterial task set by the teacher. Lofland (1971, cited in the
context of qualitative research methods by Miles &c
Huberman, 1984) offers the opinion that it is not until one attempts to complete this task that one truly begins to think.
Processing and presenting information
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) say that children have a major problem in getting access to and establishing order for the knowledge that they have acquired. Their control over relevant content seems to be unstable. For example, when asked to state which items of subject knowledge they would not include in an essay, 9 year olds could not
imagine knowing something and excluding it on the grounds that it did not fit some overall plan. The essay plans that they produced tended to be lists of content items simply arranged in the order that they had come to mind.
In addition, Koba sigawa (1983) found that while 9 and 13 year olds were able to assess the adequacy of a report, they noticed lack of important information, not inclusion of irrelevant material. These findings are in accord with those reported by Sheingold (1987) with respect to the tenuous relationship between a question, notes taken and resulting solutions produced by students.
Given the difficulties of finding and extracting
important information from texts and the added problems of putting it into one's own words, it is not surprising that project assignments result in s tudents copying tracts of text. However, copying should not be taken as a sign that understanding is totally lacking. Cole and Gar dner (1979)
noted that although written work was largely c opied,
students demonstrated their ability to restructure material in the course of oral presentatiqns and discussions.
Perhaps this is due to what Avann (1985) calls "a sense of audience". She and Irving (1985) agree that having a clear idea of with whom one is communicating may make the task of "putting it in one's own words" easier for children.
Indeed, the effects of "li veil communication were obliquely mentioned by Rudduck and Hopkins (1984) who found that library rules of silence hindered si:<th form students in their study attempts. The conflict her-e is that while one has to be able to concentrate, talking and inter- acting with an audience often advances knowledge.