THEY are the ‘Wiki generation’ who have grown up with an unlimited trove of information at their tech-savvy fingertips.
But there are fears use of encyclopedic websites such as Wikipedia can stymie modern education with pupils able to cut and paste in seconds everything they might ever need to know for a school project.
Now a new partnership between Glasgow University and a city primary school is seeking to redress the balance by teaching pupils basic research skills and critical thinking in a move than proved stressful but rewarding.
Under the scheme, pupils from the private Kelvinside Academy have been encouraged to think up topics relevant to them and cultivate data through questionnaires to the rest of the school.
Subjects chosen included whether homework helped them learn, what the school community thought about Brexit and whether boys or girls felt more pressure during tests.
Dr Niamh Stack, a senior lecturer from the university’s School of Psychology, said the internet is an abundant source of information, but could also be “limiting”.
She said: “One of the reasons we convinced the school to engage in the project was that they were keen to stop that happening and teach pupils genuine research skills and picking topics that they couldn’t just use Wikipedia to research.
“The more you have to engage with material and the more active the learning is the more embedded your understanding of a concept will be, whereas if you just have to cut and paste from a website the depth of learning and critical thinking is more limited.”
Dr Stack said another advantage of the project was it challenged pupils to solve problems as they went along.
She said: “Pupils found it challenging because they had open-ended boundaries and they sometimes found that stressful because there was no simple solution when things went wrong.
“But the most important thing was that they said they liked that challenge and I think we are at risk of lowering expectations for children at the moment and we seem terrified if they fail something.”
Andrew Dickenson, head of the academy’s junior school, said the project, which was run with the help of fourth year university student Bethan Howells, had inspired pupils.
He said: “Children usually think of research as visiting websites and they don’t see it as generating their own knowledge so this has been an incredibly revealing learning curve for our pupils.
“It’s fantastic to see the results of the initiative as there really are no limitations. The only thing that can hold them back is their own curiosity.”
As an introduction to the project, visited Glasgow University to hear academics discuss their own research into subjects such as face recognition and the links between social media and changing sleep patterns. The pupils were then taught about the nature of research, ethics, gender balance and the framing of a question before they chose an issue to research. The researchers will now look for a school in the state sector to run a similar project in a different context.
Previous research has suggested active participation empowers children and gives them a voice.
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