I’d love to know how teachers in this generation have worked around the use of Wikipedia in research papers for high school and junior high school. Obviously Wikipedia provides a pretty substantial trove of information, which, despite obvious reliability issues, gives a student a lot of digestible and complex material—including viewpoints, interpretations, and places for more information. I and my generation did not have the advantage of easily accessible information like kids today.
How can a teacher judge the quality of a student’s critical thinking skills when perusing Wikipedia can make anyone sound fairly knowledgeable about a given topic very quickly?
Wikipedia does the work for you, pretty much. So how do teachers accurately gauge a student’s mastery of the material with Wikipedia so readily available? I personally could have saved myself weeks of in depth library research if I had Wikipedia when I was younger. I learned a lot due to the time I spent actively pursuing information. But now I worry about today’s kids…how can you make them work as hard as we did with today’s technology?
I am not an English/Language Arts teacher, but I do teach high school science.
One tool that is widely used in secondary schools as well as colleges and universities is turnitin.com. I have not used it myself, but many of my colleagues have. Students submit their papers through this website that basically checks the submission to see if any or all of it has been copied (or even closely paraphrased) from elsewhere on the internet. This cuts down on the copy/paste form of “writing” a paper.
Also, I believe our English department has a policy that Wikipedia itself cannot be used as a citation for a student’s paper. A student can, however, use the sources that are cited in a Wikipedia article.
Technology has certainly made it easier for students to find information about most topics. That is a very good thing! And that same technology has also made it easier for teachers to identify plagiarism. Also a good thing.
I’m having difficulty seeing how this question is specific to Wikipedia. Surely your concerns also apply to traditional print encyclopedias, which have been around for centuries?
Wikipedia is different from encyclopedias because it contains not only information, but viewpoints, conclusions, etc. Most important people that have died and have a dedicated Wikipedia page have a “Legacy” section, which talks about their contributions to the field. There’s your concluding paragraph for your paper. No work required. It’s very different, IMHO.
Fair enough. I didn’t know other places had it too. I thought Encyclopedia Britannica and all those were just inferior compared to Wikipedia. If only because when you search for something, you’re going to get a Wikipedia article first, and if you’re a student who does things last-minute, you’re going to use that article as much as you can.
My point though is basically that I wonder if everything’s been said or written, maybe not just on Wikipedia, but online in general. For school-level work, if you have to do a report on Martin Luther King Jr, you can find everything you need online. Your conclusions, your thoughts–somebody’s probably concluded or thought the same, and more eloquently than you can. It’s just a matter of searching. I feel like all you need to succeed is to have skill in rearranging thoughts of others so Turnitin doesn’t notice. And Turnitin only protects against those stupid enough to try and cut and paste, right? If you use enough synonyms, sentence rearrangement, and fancy words, I feel like every point you could possibly make is available to you, without any critical thought of your own.
Therefore, success becomes the domain of bullshit artists–those who can fashion other people’s better thoughts and ideas as their own.
I don’t want education to become a matter of who can parrot information the best.
The problem with Wikipedia and most other on-line sources is that there is really no check on the credentials of the authors, and no really meaningful peer review of any academic merit.
Critical thinking and knowledge of facts are two different things. I don’t see the conflict.
I don’t teach any more, but when I did, written assignments that required research had little to do with “mastery” of facts such as those presented in Wikipedia.
There are many tools that speed up research. Wikipedia is one of them. More important to me are electronic journal access, linked references, and cited reference searches. With one paper (perhaps found on wpedia), I have near-instant access to all the papers it cites and every paper that cites it This means that for that same three-week paper I can access much more information, and instructors can expect students to access much more information.
What is lost are the serendipitous discoveries. The book sitting next to the one you found in the card catalog. The article right after the one you were looking up.
For younger students, we can require some arbitrary number of sources. I recall having to use footnotes starting in 7th grade. We weren’t allowed to cite the encyclopedia.
Schools teach rote knowledge and test techniques far better than they do anything like critical thinking. That’s another problem that just seems to get worse and worse the harder we try to “fix” education.
IF the students are being taught what you’re saying here - what research really consists of, and why you learn it as a skill (independently of finding out what George Washington’s dog’s name was), and how to use the absolutely science-fictional tools at our fingertips these days… it’s to the good.
However, far too much of what I see being taught is “go find the name of the dog” and oh yeah, list a cite for it. The “research” part is deprecated and turned into drudgery to be minimized - because the name of the dog can be checked off in a grading pass, and research is a bitch to evaluate fairly.
Absolutely. I can’t begin to list how many things I found by looking at a library shelf - one of my basic research techniques was to quickly look up a few relevant titles, then go scan those shelves. One of the great innovations in library cataloging was when you could do an e-search, and it would list all the books on that shelf, which you could then scroll endlessly. Best of both worlds except that you don’t get to laugh at the author photos.
WP, IMVHO, has potential for the trained researcher but is a well-worn crutch for most K-12 students. A crutch that never does teach them to walk.
My last school-level paper was typed on a Selectric before the invention of the modem, much less Wikipedia.
IMO/IME, all school level research paper-like work consists/consisted solely of parroting the ideas of others gleaned from books. They wanted a footnote for every assertion. Any synthesis on your own part was frowned on. What you were supposed to be demonstrating was exactly the skills of locating the source material, determining if it was relevant, then copying it as quotes into your paper hooked together by a few well-formed original sentences of glue.
The ideal paper ended with something like
Compared to that pitiful idea of a good paper, IMO, Wiki saves monkey-labor on copying the properly attributed sections (good) and encourages folks to also plagiarize their glue paragraphs (bad). IOW, it does very little to harm the benefits the instructor intended the student to receive from doing the work.
In fact I wonder how turnitin, et al, react to a proper paper that’s abut 75% properly attributed quotes from sources written in complex professional academic prose and 25% dirt simple sentences written at the appropriate grade level of complexity and correctness?
I teach at university level, so I don’t have direct experience of primary / high school. My kids are at primary school though, so I have some appreciation for the types of task they are given.
The rough progression we are looking for is:
Get students looking for information at all (this is where you want them just getting used to finding stuff). Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia for that matter) is like a bare minimum. “Congratulations, you found the easiest stuff to find. What else did you find?”
This used to be teaching them to not just look up wombats in the encyclopedia, but also in a book about marsupials. Now it’s more “Don’t just go to the first search result”.
Get them to use the source with basic academic integrity. Usually we are still teaching this when they get to university, and some students make it to postgrad without fully getting it. It doesn’t really matter if it is Wikipedia or a complicated scientific paper, it’s learning not to cut and paste, how to quote, how to paraphrase properly.
Getting them to understand that sources are not trustworthy. Again, we are still teaching this at university, but even primary school students get taught to apply some basic heuristics for what makes something more or less trustworthy.
Getting them to use sources critically. This includes knowing when to quote and when to paraphrase, synthesis, comparison, critique, reflection etc. My impression is that this depends a lot on the teacher, and how much they are concerned with getting the earlier steps solid first. It’s really hard to explain the difference between “original thought” and “not using any sources”.
It’s easy for me teaching postgrads, because I have a very narrow field and I can recognise where ideas come from. If a student says something without citing it, I can usually tell if it is their own idea or from an uncited source. This is much harder for high school teachers and student work that is broader and shallower. They either have to default to not encouraging original ideas (“cite everything”) or accepting that students will have “original ideas” that are only original because the student is unaware of related work that’s out there.
??? A german encyclopedia says “In 1915, and again in 1939, Germany regained its outer territories, but alas it was only temporary, the west spitefully stole them back”.