Save your child from drowning in information     019

A great deal has been written about academic culture shock—what happens when school students go to university and are confronted with an avalanche of information from a variety of sources, in overlapping layers, all arranged using different time periods and schedules. The University of Sydney website has for example over two million pages, and many thousands of academic articles are downloaded by students and staff each year. Today university students are handling a volume of information at least 10 times greater than was the case before full computerisation and the Internet. The pace of responding to that information has also greatly increased.  Students are expected to access a great many books, articles and chapters. Course organisers make extra demands by e-mailing lists of references which the student has to review, or discuss etc. It is simply non-stop—students get home, open their computers, and bing-bang, there is another lot of work. The big computer has struck again.

The problem starts not at university but at high school particularly during Years 11 and 12. Unfortunately so many students continue their habits of looking at an information source, copying something, putting it down, getting another information source, finding something else to copy, and so on. When there is a whole mess of information they just move things around a little bit, and re-write a few things here and there, and that’s it. When studying complicated texts, such as a Shakespeare play, students find it difficult to integrate and coordinate information from a number of sources. Mostly they just pile everything into computer files, forming multitudinous heaps of mish-mash.

No wonder they have problems when they go to university. From what I have seen it seems many students are not being taught how to use their computer effectively to store, organise, structure and present their information ready for learning or writing. This can apply especially to some private schools which provide students with high levels of electronic information. Ironically the thing which can save them, the computer, is also the means by which teachers and others create the problem in the first place.

How can parents help?  Now most parents go to work and are able to access and use very effective ways of moving information around. Talk to your son or daughter about how they are using the information they have. There is no need to become an English teacher—simply ask, “Are you backing that up?” or “Wow, that’s a lot of information. Are you going to group it—well what about characters, themes, settings etc.?” Of course some teachers are showing students how to organise their information, and today the power of computers can make this task a lot easier.

Have a look at how your student sets out references. Almost certainly the required details will be very incomplete. Sometimes, and only sometimes, teachers send home examples of how referencing should be done. One of the biggest problems is that children think that for sources obtained from the Internet all that is necessary is to write down the URL. They do not understand that an Internet source still has an author, title and point of publication. Actually it’s a very good idea, when writing assignments, to start on the reference list first and get it done properly right at the beginning. By the time children reach the end of writing an assignment they are in no mood to reference anything.

If you are not fully comfortable with all this perhaps your son or daughter has friends who can help, or perhaps a relative. Parents often think that because children can download who knows what, or do amazing things with photographs, or jump about on Facebook that they know how to use the computer to organise academic information. Indeed many Year 12 students do not know how to even change a margin or paragraph setting and this is because they have never been taught.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services