Learning and the digital library - Children and the Digital Library

A more interesting -- and difficult -- conceptual issue is the incompatibility between students' knowledge bases and conceptual structures and those inherent in databases. As novices, most students lack the vocabulary, the conceptual schemata, and the cognitive flexibility enjoyed by the experts for whom the majority of digital resources are designed. In this study, students' inability to generate synonyms, combined with their naivete about how electronic information resources are structured, often frustrated their ability to use even self-contained CD-ROM resources effectively. Extrapolating this situation to the larger world of the digital library raises concerns about how productively students might use this world for learning. Superimposed on the difficulties inherent in any keyword-searching system, how will students' linguistic and conceptual naivete affect their chances of productive searching?

Students' limited command of synonyms reflected their inexperience with many of the ideas that adolescents go to school to master. One student's exasperation illustrates the problem: You have to find a synonym. But if you don't know about [a topic], then how are you going to get a synonym?" How, indeed, are students going to find the words and generate the ideas they will need to access information across the digital library? Words are keys to concepts, and students' limited vocabularies suggest a conceptual immaturity as well as a linguistic one. In a self-contained electronic information resource like a CD-ROM, a built-in the-saurus similar to those routinely found in word-processors could have helped by giving students access to information through vocabulary -- and, therefore, concepts-that did not exist in their own conceptual structures. But no such tool existed in the CD-ROMs let alone in the online databases that these students used. Extrapolating the issue beyond this limited environment makes it even more complex because it raises questions about how students can access the most relevant and appropriate information across multiple resources without some mechanism that will expand their vocabularies and conceptual schemata. Lack of knowledge can thwart even simple explorations in subject areas students might want (or need) to study, and these novices might not even be aware that they had missed major and critical information.

Even beyond the difficulties engendered by their limited vocabularies, students' naive -- and often inflexible-conceptual structures about their research areas also hindered their ability to use the text-based electronic information resources in this study. First, it is important to note that the students' structures seemed to reflect almost exactly the structures imposed by curriculum categories in general and by teachers' assignments in particular: as school and public librarians well know, if the history assignment is a research paper on the Civil War, then the phrase "Civil War" may represent the students' entire understanding of the research task, at least at the beginning of a project. Not surprisingly, the students in this study were not always able to exceed the boundaries imposed by a teacher's explanation of a task. Also not surprisingly, without intervention, the students flailed about in both online and CD-ROM resources just as unproductively as students often do when they use "traditional" reference sources.