Teaching Fourth Grade Elementary School Students How to Search
A field report from teaching at a local elementary school
Halloween is awfully exciting for fourth graders, so it seems unlikely that it would be ideal for teaching two classes of 9 year-olds how to search. But it’s the day we had the chance to teach at a local elementary school, so I drove up the freeway to visit the classroom and do our best.
I went to a typical Californian elementary school of around 400 kids. It’s a K-5 school (kindergarten through 5th grade), with two or three classes of each grade. It’s an upper-middle class school that has a large grassy area, big open breezeways, Halloween posters up on the walls and kids in costume. It also has very broad ethnic diversity with at least a dozen primary non-English languages (we noticed Spanish, Hindi, Tagalog, Italian, Chinese, Korean).
We were invited by a former student of mine who is now a teacher at the school. She had taken one of my “Search for Teachers” classes and invited us to come teach the two fourth grade classes a bit about search.
Fourth grade is when most California students start to seriously use internet search as a key part of their curriculum. They need to write reports and find information beyond what’s in the textbooks. Typical topics for research are California history — usually the California Mission system and the lives of the local Native Americans.
Our goals in teaching the class were to understand how kids and novices search, and to explore what it would take to teach in a young elementary classroom setting.
The school has computers in each classroom (4 or 5), usually “downstreamed” computers that are moving down the food chain. They’re usually underpowered and run a variety of operating systems and versions of browsers. When we visited the class, 2 of the 5 were in a very funky state, unable to really do much of anything and requiring restarts.
But the school has a modern computer lab with 31 Macs. Each child has an assigned station and knows how to start up and launch the browser. Every child was familiar enough to get that down quickly.
Typing issues dominate 4th grade search: No surprise here — but if you can’t type, it’s hard to search. Kids who had basic touch-typing skills could outsearch hunt-and-peck typists by at least a factor of 3. Note that touch-typing is being taught in the 4th grade, but kids don’t (as a class) seem to be skilled until grade 6 (11 years old). Plans are to have typing taught in 3rd grade next year.
Suggestions go unseen: As a side-effect of not touch-typing, the Suggests pop-down list is often unseen. When the kid’s focus is on getting the correct next letter, the presence of a pop-down list is purely secondary. (It’s a classic example of change blindness: if you don’t see the pop-down animation, you’ll completely miss the visual appearance of the list.)
Slightly more worrisome, when I pointed out the suggestions list to kids who were having trouble typing, they tended to fixate on it, and over-use the list. That is, they’d search for an item on the list, even when it wasn’t the right one. I got the sense that they would also be more distracted than normal by interesting items in the list. Attention span is an issue for kids — it’s unclear that the Suggestions are a good idea. (Especially when suggestions like “Victoria’s Secret” appear while typing “vic…” Trust me: many 4th grade boys know what Victoria’s Secret is.)
Warning — class on the verge of control: Teaching a class of 30 fourth graders is a bit like rounding up cats. They all want to experiment on their own trying out what you tell them… and they can’t do that without talking to their neighbor. That’s actually usually okay — the kids who understand what’s going on are helping out their buddies who don’t get it. For the most part, fourth graders aren’t trying to sabotage each other, nor do they suffer (yet) from a lack of confidence or a great deal of worry. Instead, they mostly just dive in. They just do so with vigor and discussion, often 2 and 3 kids to the computer. If you find yourself teaching a room of 30 fourth graders, expect chaos — and revel in it.
The VP birthday problem and executive control: I asked them a fairly simple question — the “Vice-President Birthday” problem. The original statement is this: “What day of the week is the US vice-president’s birthday next year?”
It’s an interesting problem because most (my guess: >85%) of fourth graders can’t figure it out. They get either trying to figure out what the VP’s name is (Is Richard the same as Dick?), get lost when trying to track down the birth-date, or they can’t make the leap to finding a calendar for next year. In developmental psychology terms, 4th graders lack the executive control skills to organize their work from hearing the problem all the way through to solution.
But most fifth graders seem able to solve the problem! What happens in that year of development? Clearly, that executive skill development kicks in: the child can suddenly focus on getting from the VP’s name to their birthday, and then from their birthday to the day-of-the-week.
Even so, some fifth graders still get stuck on apparently irrelevant issues — “Is next year a leap year?” But lest we get too grown-up about it, an analogous deficiency is apparent in adults as well. Many adults find it difficult to manage multi-step search problems as well. When I teach classes of adults, I find that many can’t solve the kangaroo meat question, which has the same structure as the VP problem. (That is, you need to first find one resource, then another, and link the information between them.) Skilled adults take 20 minutes, on average, to answer the question “How many pounds of kangaroo meat are imported into the US every year?” Many adults are never able to figure it out.
When should you click on a Map tab? One of the questions I gave the students was to find a map of the climate regions in California. Some of the kids know that Google offers maps. They even know that we have a Maps tab on the SERP. So, I had kids ask, “Why not click on Maps tab?”
Hmmm. This makes me pause. I find that I have to teach them to ignore the obvious cue and instead learn to rephrase their question into terms that will work. I hate having to teach them that “you search like this because this is the way Google thinks…”
Turns out that the best way to find a map of climate regions in California is to look in Images. Now THAT’s not an obvious move, but it’s clearly the best. (Try it: [ climate regions California ] The web search results aren’t that great. Now click on the Images tab.) The key is to realize that what you’re really looking for is an IMAGE of a map. Once you know that, then clicking on the Images tab is clearly the best way to look for multiple maps at once.
When do you add a descriptive term? One issue that keeps coming up for kids is finding material appropriate to their level. If they’re interested in the local Native American tribes, they end up looking for [ Ohlone ] (the local tribe’s name). But the results for Ohlone aren’t that great for this task. Ohlone College gets mixed in and some of the content is rather advanced. The trick of adding a descriptive term such as “overview” often makes the results a better match for kids.
This is something I see a fair bit — people adding descriptor terms to get to a particular KIND of result, rather than honing in on the concept.
Spelling correction is crucial: Unsurprisingly, kids have a hard time spelling. But not all of them noticed that “Did you mean” red text on the page. Once we pointed that out, it became a beloved feature.
This is especially important ESL kids. Until they learn the whacky writing structure of English, their native language does them no good, and spell-correction is often the only way kids with non-English as their first language can make it to their target content.
Inter-class variation: Teachers can make a huge difference. The difference in computer-use skill levels between the classes was enormous! In the less-skilled class, 10% of the kids knew about Control-F. What’s more, when I taught them about it, we had to teach them what the Control key was, and why you have to hold it down FIRST and only *then* press the F key. By contrast, 100% of the other class knew about Control-F to find-on-page. No surprise here — the teacher of the less-skilled class didn’t know how to use any control keys. (But somewhat surprisingly, I discovered that the more skilled teacher had learned it from me (Dan), by taking one of my search classes.)
I use the Control-F question as an indicator of class skills, but the difference ran deeper than just that. In the less-skilled class, students knew fewer web sites and they seemed to search with longer queries, much less effectively.
Query formation: Kids mostly don’t know where to start when framing a search. But boys who have searched for Tim Lincecum (a brilliant young pitcher for the SF Giants back in 2008) quickly learn to NOT search for him by number. The query [ 55 ] (Lincecum’s number) isn’t useful. As a consequence, boys learn to not search for numbers; an effective rule of thumb.
More generally, kids this age seem to have few strategies for figuring out how to create a query. The most common strategy I see in kids’ classes is to directly copy the question (if posed by a teacher), or to use literally the first few words that occur to them.
This is the huge difference between novice and skilled searchers: kids literally don’t know where to begin. In the Vice-president’s birthday question, I had one kid ask “should I search for the word vice-president?” It’s hard for us as adults to see, but query formation is not obvious. It just becomes so with practice.
What do boys search for? Sports. You should have known, but this is one case where the stereotype rings true (at least in Silicon Valley, and I’m willing to bet money that it’s even stronger elsewhere). Left to their own devices, 4th grade boys will search for information about the local sports team. Here near San Francisco, that means a lot of searches about the Giants, the Raiders, the A’s, and the 49ers. (My suspicion is that lots of searches happen in conjunction with televised games and whenever printed materials come out, e.g., Sports Illustrated for Kids.)
What do girls search for? Everything. I talked with a lot of 4th grade girls (both in Foster City and in Palo Alto) and they’re all over the map. If there’s one common theme, it’s looking for books, but even so, it’s a weak commonality. Mostly, girls have a very broad set of interests.
Translate is a huge success: In a city that’s as multicultural as Foster City, it should have come as no surprise that demonstrating Google Translate would be a huge success. The kids just ate it up.
When I asked the question “And how can we find the Google Translate web page?” I got blank stares. It hadn’t occurred to them that they could SEARCH for something like Translate. They didn’t think of it as a web-page, so how could you search for it? I explained you could search for an online tool and you could see their eyes light up. It was as though an entirely new world had opened up for them.
So we searched and found it just fine. There were a few nods of insight. Not everyone understood that you could search for things on Google too, but a few did.
One boy then asked if Google could translate from English into Korean. I said “yes, just use the pull-down menu to find the language to translate into…” He did that. Then typed “Hi Grandma. I’m in school.” He clicked on translate, saw it convert to Korean text and looked up at me with a bright smile. “Cool!” he said, “Now I can write to Grandma!”
And now he knows how to search as well.
