Using the Web
Many of the pages of this textbook
point to web pages maintained by others. And, in
your studies you will consult many web pages.
How do we know which
pages on the web can be trusted?
How can I find information on the web?
- I use Google for most of my
searches.
- Then I start looking at pages that appear to be useful, paying
some attention to the URL.
- After I have found a good article, I add it to my bookmark list.
- If the article is available in pdf format, download it and store
it in a folder of articles.
How do we know what material to trust?
- Who produced the material?
- Material produced by an expert tends to be more trustworthy
than material produced by others. But remember, even experts
are biased: "Experts"—from criminologists
to real-estate agents—use their informational advantage to serve
their own agenda: From Freakonomics (2005).
- Is there material at the site describing the author's credentials
or experience?
- Is the writer anonymous?
- Who uses the material?
- Is it cited by others?
- Is it linked from trustworthy sites?
- Has the site won awards?
- Has the material been reviewed by peers?
- Journal articles on the web from respected journals are peer
reviewed.
- Some journals are better than others. The best are Science and Nature.
- Some web pages are reviewed by portals such as the Digital
Library for Earth System Education DLESE
- Some data sets and information may have been described in published
articles cited by the site.
- Who hosts the page?
- College, university, government, grammar school, commercial,
or personal web site? Some domains such as .edu, .org, and .gov
are good sources of scientific information.
- Does the hosting organization have strong opinions? Most organizations
are biased. This is neither good nor bad. We just need to be
aware of biases. Greenpeace and the US National Marine Fisheries
Service may have differing, but valid viewpoints.
- When was the web page last updated?
- Some sites are many years old.
- Oceanography is changing rapidly, and often more recent sites
have the best information.
- False Friends, web pages that mimic scientific
sites.
- They may be hosted by a non-profit organization.
- They appear to be written by an expert.
- They have many references at the end of the article.
- Yet the information is misleading or incorrect.
- Sites offering medical advice, advice on diets or nutrition,
or cures for common diseases sometimes fall into this category.
They are written by medical doctors, they reference obscure journal
articles, and they are hosted by the doctor's organization.
- Beware the Widely Quoted Statistic
- Some statistics are widely quoted by many different
authors, yet they may be incorrect or misleading.
- What is the original source of the statistic?
- Was the original source reliable.
- Consider this statistic:
Children from low-income households
average just 25 hours of shared reading time with their parents
before starting school, compared with 1,000 to 1,700 hours for
their counterparts from middle-income homes.
These oft-repeated numbers originate in
a 1990 book by Marilyn Jager Adams titled, "Beginning to Read:
Thinking And Learning About Print." Ms. Adams got the 25-hours
estimate from a study of 24 children in 22 low-income families. For
the middle-income figures, she extrapolated from the experience of
a single child: her then-4-year-old son, John. She laid out her calculations
and sources carefully over five pages, trying to make clear that
she was demonstrating anecdotally the dramatic difference between
the two groups.
In the 17 years since then, at least a half-dozen
child-advocacy groups, including United Way, Kids in Common and Everybody
Wins, have boiled down those five pages into a single sentence, repeated
in various forms, often without attribution to the original source.
As is typical for such numbers, the child-reading stats have taken
on a life of their own through a game of media telephone, with news
articles usually attributing the numbers to one of these advocacy
groups or to various researchers or foundations that themselves got
the numbers from the Adams book.
For her book, Ms. Adams drew on a 1986 study by William Teale and
colleagues of low-income families in Southern California. Using his
findings about reading time per child, she extrapolated to their
time before entering school and averaged the total. Prof. Teale,
who now teaches education at the University of Illinois, Chicago,
says his findings couldn't be generalized to the overall population,
nor did he ever make that claim: "We had way too small a sample."
From Bialik (2007).
- Peer-Reviewed Papers Are Often Wrong
References
Bialik, C. (2007). It seems to exist, but how to measure class gap in
reading? Wall Street Journal: B1.
Revised on:
30 May, 2017
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