I agree with you, as a teacher. Students of ages 11-16 often don’t even know how to find the answer to a simple question online, for example ‘between what frequencies is EM radiation visible?’
That surprises me. Definitely in my high school we had a lot of web-research assignments, and by grade 12 we were expected to cite ‘high-quality’ sources like journal articles and the web pages of major (and thus respectable, I guess) organizations. Although I still use Wikipedia for a lot of my casual personal research, I never found those assignments hard.
...Then again, like I’m starting to realize, I may have encountered sample bias in high school, considering that I was in mostly AP classes.
Just to clarify, I work in a very low-performing school (bottom 10% of UK). In many schools, children will be much more able. However, it still surprises me that people who spend hours a day online can’t use google.
True. The school I attended was situated in a very wealthy neighborhood, and was well-known for its academics...and classes were segregated into “enriched”, “regular”, and “applied”. I spent most of my time in the enriched stream, and barely ever interacted with the “applied” kids, since they weren’t usually the ones doing band or drama club.
I agree with you, as a teacher. Students of ages 11-16 often don’t even know how to find the answer to a simple question online, for example ‘between what frequencies is EM radiation visible?’
That surprises me. Definitely in my high school we had a lot of web-research assignments, and by grade 12 we were expected to cite ‘high-quality’ sources like journal articles and the web pages of major (and thus respectable, I guess) organizations. Although I still use Wikipedia for a lot of my casual personal research, I never found those assignments hard.
...Then again, like I’m starting to realize, I may have encountered sample bias in high school, considering that I was in mostly AP classes.
Just to clarify, I work in a very low-performing school (bottom 10% of UK). In many schools, children will be much more able. However, it still surprises me that people who spend hours a day online can’t use google.
True. The school I attended was situated in a very wealthy neighborhood, and was well-known for its academics...and classes were segregated into “enriched”, “regular”, and “applied”. I spent most of my time in the enriched stream, and barely ever interacted with the “applied” kids, since they weren’t usually the ones doing band or drama club.