Help for the Digital Natives

In this year’s 6th grade curriculum, students are enjoying a new weekly offering: the Digital Literacy and Research Skills 6 course. What previously appeared in smaller chunks within various classes, this new course teaches 6th grade students how to conduct research and navigate the digital world.

The idea came about as Middle School schedule changes brought the opportunity for a new course that would meet once per week. “We identified that while research skills are woven into various projects throughout the curriculum, there was insufficient time to introduce and practice the discrete skills that help make the research process less daunting for 6th graders,” said Director of Middle School Cynthia Harmon. “They have an overwhelming amount of information at their fingertips, and this course focuses on the many different facets of research in the digital age.

“Guided by our Middle School Librarian Amelia Herring, our students have dedicated instructional time to explore topics such as what makes a good research question, how to evaluate if AI is helping me to think or doing the ‘thinking’ for me, or how to take good notes.”

Harmon collaborated with Herring on the creation of the course, who said that teaching it to 6th grade students felt appropriate as it’s “a really important time to address the aspects of technology that are so pervasive but not really addressed in the academic sphere,” Herring said. “Also, 6th grade is such a great age to get students digging into these topics before many of them are ‘chronically online’ as older students.

“I love getting to tell kids the inside scoop — the behind-the-scenes story — about the information they consume,” she said. “Where does it come from? Who created it? Why? These students already know so much instinctively about what they're seeing on screens, and it's rewarding to give them the vocabulary and deeper understanding to articulate it.”

S. Scherer ’32 couldn’t agree more. “The most interesting thing I have learned is that there is always more below the surface,” she said. “I have learned to always stay curious because curiosity leads to discoveries. I have found this really helpful because I can tie it to other subjects, such as science where we are learning about women and their challenges, and how they pushed through and made amazing discoveries.”

As an added bonus, Herring is hoping to tackle students’ loss of reading stamina as she teaches this course. “One of the things we keep saying in this class is that ‘research is READING,’” she said. “We practice sustained attention to reading for 2-3 minutes at the beginning of every class as a way of building stamina. It can be hard to focus intently on something as a 6th grader, and I think we're all finding that devices have shortened our attention spans, so exercising those muscles regularly to keep them strong is not just in service to reading for fun, which we know helps with vocabulary and empathy, but also to decoding informational texts for classwork and research.”