Many teachers hesitate to integrate internet research into their lessons as they face major uncertainties concerning their students’ competencies in retrieving, evaluating and processing digital information. Understanding complex geographical conflicts using the internet poses special challenges to students, as they need to obtain multi-dimensional, spatial and temporally relevant information to grasp the conflict in its entirety. In order to obtain insights into students’ digital researching strategies, a study was conducted in 2018 with 20 German secondary school students, who were asked to form their own opinion on a complex geographical conflict by searching the internet for useful information. The students were instructed to share their thoughts and actions aloud while undertaking the research. All digital activities and accompanying speech were recorded with screen and audio capture technology. The analysis of the transcripts consisted of a combination of qualitative and basic quantitative analysis, which led to the conclusion that students have very different abilities in identifying multi-dimensional information on complex geographical conflicts. The majority of the students neither used maps nor paid attention to publication dates of websites or information. Furthermore, none of the participants questioned the credibility of their retrieved digital information.
In secondary school geography lessons, students are encouraged to form argumentatively founded opinions on complex geographical conflicts. For these conflicts, there is no one right solution and the content quality of the argumentation lies especially in the multi-perspective approach to the conflict and the integration of spatial information. The Internet offers a wealth of multiperspective and spatial information on a great number of geographical conflicts worldwide. However, the digital information is neither checked nor filtered nor didactically prepared. This study examined the ability of 20 German secondary school students in developing arguments on a complex geographical conflict after searching the Internet for information. The students' information search and their concurrent verbalisations were taped using screen and audio capture technology. The developed arguments have been assessed using defined criteria for argumentations on geographical conflicts. The analysis of the arguments showed that the students included a range of perspectives , which suggests that they were able to use the Internet as a source for obtaining multi-perspective information on the conflict. However, whilst effective digital information retrieval was the pre-condition in understanding the geographical conflict, it has not shown to guarantee the development of a high-quality argumentation.
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