Children naturally want to explore. They want to know how the world works around them. They observe and experiment with their environment. If they are a bit bigger, they can look for information themselves. In our current society it is important that information can be searched, understood and processed quickly. The information must be usable. In primary school, children can learn to find and process that information.
Information acquisition and strategies
Information acquisition is the retrieval and processing of information. Children in primary school have to deal with a lot of written information. Reading written information is not the same as reading comprehension.
Looking for information
The information when gathering information is not there yet, it must first be found. The information found must be well understood and remembered as a coherent whole. Looking up and acquiring serve a purpose, for example an oral or written presentation. It is very difficult for children to choose the right one from all that information. So much information is coming their way.
Lookup ways
General look up
- Children can generaland specific to look up.
- First they will have to define what they want to know.
- They try to find a keyword that is as clear as possible. If the child does not find the answer, a different keyword is chosen.
- They can then use a home page to find the answer. Similarly, a search engine.
- There are many sites available for children, where things are explained in children’s language.
Look up specifically
- A child will have to select what to use from what has been found.
- Then it must be processed into an answer or a presentation.
- Finally, a child will have to evaluate whether this route was right and whether it found what it was looking for.
- If a child knows specifically what it is looking for, it will learn to type in the URL.
The library
Of course the library is a source of information. If a child wants information on a topic, there will certainly be one or more books on that topic. If the child cannot find the informational book on their own, there will certainly be a librarian who can help. Dictionaries are also an opportunity to look up information in both the library and at school, both in the cupboard and on the internet.
Processing information
Looking up the meaning of a word in a dictionary is reading comprehension.
Processing information into an oral or written presentation requires more from a child. It must categorize and integrate the information with its own knowledge. Strategies are also needed here.
Strategies
- Rereading will be required more often. By rereading, a child makes the structure of a text his own. By monitoring teachers (showing up), a child experiences the benefit of rereading
- Underline the important things. Children need to learn what is important to the writer and what information is important to the child
- Create a schedule. The most important concepts or sentences are found and the relationships between these concepts are put in a diagram
- Make a summary. The text is briefly presented in a summary. A child has to identify and organize the main thoughts in a text
- Take notes. This has proven effective for memorizing and understanding texts
- Ask yourself questions, are the answers in the text? Questions can be asked before, during and after reading the text. This helps children to understand and remember the information better
There are two ways for teachers and parents to help their children
- Monitoring (acting out loud) which strategy is the best way to find information for this specific book or the site found at that moment.
- The children can be made to work on this in heterogeneous groups, because several ways can arrive at the right one.
- For the motivation of children it is important that a meaningful search for texts is made.