Sandy, I taught middle school for 15 years and I know that any time you can get the kids attention and surprise them with tangible results you've got a teaching moment.

Thanks for sharing your real world experiences!

Dennis@21CIF

On 5/25/07, QT - Sandy B. <qtopic+38-Vb387ESCjwcJ@quicktopic.com> wrote: >
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Dennis O'Connor
E-Learning and Online Teaching
21st Century Information Fluency
Wiredinstructor.net

Cell: 530-318-1145
Home: 760-471-5262
< replied-to message removed by QT >

I have found it useful at the middle school level to demonstrate the use of keywords with simple boolean terms. I pick out a bad set and a good set so these kids can see the difference. Then we go over the search results with a plus or minus sign beside the snippets to compare how many were actually on target. They are surprised. Then we let them go search on their topic. This is not a fix all but helps.

It seems to me that kids will only be interested the the seemingly 'abstract' concepts of boolean operators when they are actively searching for information and frustrated with the results. At the point of frustration we have to be their with a lesson, or an on demand help system has to be a click a way, or the kid has to have a sense of optimistic persistence... or the teachable moment is lost.

It might be that fostering optimistic persistence is the best thing we can do.

The Question is HOW do we teach kids to be confident searchers when we spoon feed them resources and don't trust them to search during school hours? ~ Hiram

Putting a phrase inside quotations was the single most effective tactic for the high-school kids in my house. I taught this to my son and daughter and they showed their friends. It became their 'trick' of choice. Needless to say they didn't get any training in school (and weren't really interested in listening to me). Still this one stuck. Over the years I've seized the teachable moment and taught them other tricks as well. ~ Dennis

Yes, after a few disastrous attempts to give students a quick lesson on Boolean years ago, I have decided that it is more important and efficient to point the students toward the advanced searching feature of whatever tool they are using. Even then it seems more confusing than helpful for most students before 11th grade.

I think teaching students to judiciously use operators (or their +/- symbols) is valuable. They also need to know how to use them in the context of databases. Without some training it is difficult to know what those "advanced search" drop downs are for! Students can more efficiently search if they understand the operators, particularly within databases. And they are often surprised what a difference using "AND NOT" or "-" makes in their results.

What do you think: Are Operators Obsolete?

As Carl and I worked on the question of "How do Operators help? we found it increasingly difficult to find strong cases where the basic operators had a profound effect. Search engines have gotten very good at finding information based on keyword selection alone.

Still there are instances where being knowledgeable about how operators work makes all the difference.

What do you think? Are we wasting our time teaching students basic Boolean operators? ~ Dennis & Carl (21CIF Team)