Research With Technology

     When looking for some policy or standards for Michigan secondary students in regard to education and the use of technology, I came upon the "Research and Information Literacy" standards for secondary students in Michigan schools (9-12 RI).

     All the standards are pretty straight forward, each one detailing how the students should be able to distinguish between facts and sources that are questionable and would not be good use as a place to pull information from. One such standard I found, one that not many people think about when researching for a paper or presentation is the fact that biases may occur in the articles. Take for example an article from Fox News versus a story from MSNBC. Fox News is well known for being a conservative news station while MSNBC is considered more liberal. Sometimes the biases in stories or articles do not matter if a person is only concerned about the facts. The problem arises when it comes to the author commenting or expressing an opinion of the story and trying to pass it off as news. The most common place this occurs is on news stations when they bring in 'experts' to comment on a story when the facts are not yet in. An example of this is when Donald Trump made the abortion comment. CNN and other stations had people on trying to predict what the fallout would be from such a statement. The only way the public will know how this effects the polls is when the actually voting takes place.

     Another point of contention is the saying "I read it on the internet, so it must be true". In section 9-12 RI.7: "understand that using information from a single internet source might result in the reporting of erroneous facts and that multiple sources must always be researched". Just because one source, no matter how credible it may seem, reports a story does not mean it is true. A student can still use that article, but they should at least do a search to try and find another story that covers the same topic. Reporting false information, especially in a presentation or paper will make the students look rather foolish and lose points.

     The main point is to have the students learn how to use technology safely and responsibly when doing research. The job of the educators is keep students from finding misleading information, how to interrupt biases in reporting and how to correctly cite online material to avoid plagiarism.

Source from "2009 Michigan Educational Standards for Students"

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/9-12_150927_7.pdf