Adding Friction. A Librarian Asks, "Any Ideas for Quick Database Activities that Build Curiosity?"

by Debbie Abilock, May 2021

A school librarian wants to develop some "back pocket" database lessons that can be quickly deployed to online classes. One option is to find database vendors' scavenger hunts, which are one-shot activities created to familiarize students with a product's features and navigation. When the activity includes a wrap-up discussion of strategies, it will enrich the students' conceptual understanding of database characteristics and provide them with a mental model useful in navigating the next database more effectively.

An alternative to a procedural activity like a hunt is an inductive reasoning puzzle which invites curiosity about the content. The following database activities require information literacy strategies, as well as inferencing and reasoning. All involve some written work to hand in for assessment and a wrap-up discussion. After completing several of these puzzles (or your own), I like to think that students might take the bait and create their own for their classmates—a routine that could become self-sustaining.

Back Pocket Activities

1. What's missing?

Background: Vendors develop databases to fit grade ranges and specific content areas. The scope of a database is also determined by what is known and available about a subject—and how often topics are updated.

Activity: Students search and limit results to compare information on the Arctic and Antarctic in a general-purpose database. They record information about these regions that might account for the discrepancy in coverage.

Thinking skill: Compare and make inferences.

Tested in: Gale in Context (3 levels)

Research Instructions:

• Search on the word [Antarctic] and limit to "Pictures." Count how many different Antarctic animal pictures you find.
• Repeat the search using [Arctic] again limited to "Pictures." Count how many different Arctic animals are pictured.
• Search [Arctic and Antarctic] to locate information on differences between these regions.
• Use the export feature to create a citation for the article.
• Take notes on differences that might explain the number of pictures you found.

Discussion: Why might a database have more pictures of Arctic animals?

Other ideas to try:

2. Vertical and Lateral Search

Background: Some databases aggregate content from multiple publishers. While the point of view of each publication should be evaluated separately, the absence or presence of a publication is evidence of the database's scope and even of its blind spots and biases ("Whiteness and CQ Researcher").

Activity: Students do a vertical search in the database to find and read the vendor's description of a publication. From that page they can retrieve all issues, ordered by year. Next, they skim headlines from recent issues to get a feel for its scope and viewpoint (Abilock). Then they do a lateral search on the publication's title in Wikipedia and read the initial paragraph. While a lateral search cannot completely solve the problem of recognizing a point of view or misinformation within a publication (Sheridan, Walsh-Moorman et al.), it should alert students to a publisher's political leanings and selection principles. Finally, students discuss what can be learned from each type of search.

Thinking skills: Compare and evaluate.

Tested in:

• Gale General OneFile – [Tehran Times]
• ProQuest crossproduct search – [China Daily], [New American Magazine] or [Daily Beast]
• EBSCO's Points of View – [America], [Reason] or [Crisis]

Research Instructions:

• Search within the database to limit results to a single publication (vertical search).
• Open several issues and skim the headlines.
• Read the database's description of the publication.
• What hunches can you form about the publication's focus, audience, or political leanings?
• Create a citation for the database's information page about the publication.
• Search Wikipedia to locate the publication by title (lateral search). If disambiguation is needed, add [publication] or [magazine] or [news] to the search.
• Create a citation for the Wikipedia entry.
• Read the first paragraph of the entry.
• Write an annotation, comparing what you are able to gather about the publication's focus, audience, or political leanings.

Discussion: What are the strengths and weaknesses of using vertical and lateral searching to evaluate a publication?

Other ideas to try: Look for publications from countries with heavily censored media (e.g., North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea) in your databases. Use the Media Bias Chart or AllSides to identify publications that have distinct political viewpoints and determine which, if any, are included in your databases.

3. From Puzzles to Mysteries

Background: One of the key concepts in ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education is that research investigations are ongoing and unfinished. Scholars describe knowledge as evolving from sustained discourse over time (Association of College & Research Libraries). In fact, the more we discover gaps in our knowledge, the more curious we become (Leslie 38). We know that "curiosity is likely to lead to better work, but only if it's allowed time to breathe" (Leslie 176) but we treat research as bounded—inquiry is presumed to be finished when the student's work is submitted.

Activity: Students find an old research paper and upload it to JSTOR's Text Analyzer which will extract terms from the student's paper that are searched in the database holdings. The resulting text analysis suggests new keywords that could extend aspects of the student's research. By adjusting sliders, students can change the weight of a term or add and remove terms, which will uncover new scholarly sources.

Thinking skills: Comparing the effect of different search terms and refining results

Tested in: JSTOR database Text Analyzer (https://www.jstor.org/analyze/).

Research Instructions:

• Upload a completed research paper. The JSTOR Text Analyzer tool will process your uploaded paper to find key topics and terms.
• Move the slider to reweigh the importance of a search term. The tool will conduct a search on your prioritized terms to find relevant content in JSTOR.
• Refine your search further by adding or subtracting keywords that the software identified.
• Select an article from the results and cite it using the JSTOR export feature.
• Create three notecards with new information that could deepen or extend your research.

Discussion: What new ideas or surprises did you find? How does this recursive search process build your interest?

Another idea to try: Gale's Topic Finder in Academic OneFile takes the titles, subjects, and first 100 words of a subset of your top search results and visualizes them as series of tiles or on a wheel in order to encourage deeper discovery.

Design Friction

It's always tempting to shortchange planning for a short activity. The template I used here acted as my friction. It pushed me to articulate a rationale, identify skills, goals and concepts and fuse them with the directions.

The purpose of these activities is narrow: to develop an inductive puzzle, "something that commands our curiosity until we have solved it" (Leslie 183). Of course, based on student interest and curriculum relevance, these short puzzles could be developed into what Leslie describes as a mystery (46-50). Puzzles get solved whereas mysteries support sustained curiosity.

With gratitude to the many teachers and librarians who continue to noodle with me about "back pocket" puzzles and mysteries. Indeed, colleagues and peers are an invaluable source of creative friction for our learning!

Works Cited (MLA Format)

Abilock, Debbie. "What's in a Title." School Library Connection, Jan.-Feb. 2021, pp. 30-31, https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Article/2259679 .

Association of College & Research Libraries. "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education." ACRL, American Library Association, www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework#conversation.

Boven, Leaf Van, et al. "Changing Places: A Dual Judgment Model of Empathy Gaps in Emotional Perspective Taking." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 48, 2013, pp. 117-71, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-407188-9.00003-X.

"Citation Chaining." YouTube, uploaded by UNSW Canberra, 29 May 2014, youtu.be/o3I6wBbbdQA.

Leslie, Ian. Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2014.

Sheridan, Jake. "Should You Trust Media Bias Charts?" Poynter, Poynter Institute, 14 Dec. 2020, www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2020/should-you-trust-media-bias-charts/.

Walsh-Moorman, Elizabeth Ann, et al. "Naming the Moves: Using Lateral Reading to Support Students' Evaluation of Digital Sources." Middle School Journal, vol. 51, no. 5, 13 Oct. 2020, pp. 29-34, doi:10.1080/00940771.2020.1814622.

"Whiteness and CQ Researcher." YouTube, uploaded by Librarian Dave, 20 Nov. 2020, youtu.be/IWKGUQiYCwA.