I didn't get a chance to come back to this discussion sooner - mnistooaddictive thank you for thinking about my point!
nearlytoolate I don't work in my own field any longer, so I don't know whether there are published guides on teaching children this stuff. I know that the American Library Association has done work on this area and the equivalent UK organisation CILIP might produce something too for their school libraries group. Also someone else in this thread (sorry I can't remember who) said that her child was given such guidance at school, so obviously some schools are doing a better job at this than mine!
When my own children are looking things up on the internet we follow these rules and ask these questions:
- Start with known reliable sources
Government run sites, museums and galleries, professional societies, portals/resources recommended by school, and peer reviewed reference works (ie Britannica, OED) are all good. Local library services and some schools often have online access to paid-for services and databases (there is a fantastic newspaper one for instance) which you can access from home with a library card number. These are often better places to start than a Google search.
Once you've found some information, think about
Google searches often take you in to a specific page on a website, but use the 'about us' page or the homepage to find out exactly who is writing. If you're researching something about chemistry, are you looking at the work of a professional society or a 15 year old blogger? It's important to know. It might turn out that the 15 year old blogger is reliable and great, but you'd hope to find some other evidence to show this, like references to him elsewhere, or a link from a reliable source.
There are lots of enthusiasts publishing stuff on the internet, which can be a great thing, but errors can get repeated and passed around and people might have their own particular view or an axe to grind. Try to establish whether a source is reliable by looking for the same information in different places and comparing. Think about the relationship of the author to the information and their reasons for publishing it. Are they getting paid? Who by? Does this bias the information? Would you, for instance, trust Nestle if they said that formula milk is wonderful? Paid for encylopedias would not sell many subscriptions if they were not accurate. Wikipedia is a big social experiment that sometimes contains some useful information, but it's not a reliable reference source!
Don't cut and paste and always state where you found your information. This habit can't begin too early in my view. I tend to encourage my children to print stuff out or make notes, read, then write their own text without reference to the original.
Remember that as a reasonably internet-savvy adult you do a lot of this automatically as you search for something, but children don't have the experience we have at processing information and they can only learn by having someone go through this with them, just as you'd teach them to read or do maths or whatever. It is slower than looking on Google, but in my experience gives better results and less frustration in the long run as they are getting better information from the start.
And whoever said further up that they could tell me of some good science resources - I would love that! It is my weak point and we have trouble finding good information that is not too simplistic but not over technical either. So all thoughts gratefully received.
This feels like a very long self indulgent post, but hopefully will be of interest to someone :)