Wikipedia improves students' work
Students become much more concerned with accuracy when their research is posted online
2011-06-01
(Press-News.org) May 30 – Fredericton, NB – A student writing an essay for their teacher may be tempted to plagiarize or leave facts unchecked. A new study shows that if you ask that same student to write something that will be posted on Wikipedia, he or she suddenly becomes determined to make the work as accurate as possible, and may actually do better research.
Brenna Gray, an instructor at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C., was presenting the results of the study at the 2011 Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
She became interested in why students seem to adopt some technological innovations (Wikipedia, for example) and reject things their schools would like them to use, such as the student-teacher interface Blackboard. Gray says it's easy to criticize Wikipedia because of the unstructured way it is set up.
She says despite its faults, it does promote solid values for its writers, including precise citations, accurate research, editing and revision.
"Those ideals are the ones we espouse as English instructors," she said.
She decided to get first-year students in an English class to write short biographies of Canadian writers that would then be posted on Wikipedia.
What she found was that the moment the students realized their work was going public in a forum over which they had no control, they took the work a lot more seriously. They became concerned, for example, with the accuracy of facts.
Gray says it's not only the fact that their work was going public that stimulated the students, it was the realization that in producing the Wikipedia entries they were acquiring skills that were transferable to other parts of their lives.
Gray says students, like most of the rest of us, are more time-crunched than ever. They have to prioritize, and are therefore reluctant to spend time learning skills that aren't useful outside school. That includes online tools like Blackboard, which they perceive as having no relevance to other parts of their life.
Because the Wikipedia skills are perceived as transferable, students became interested in acquiring them. And they were willing to work to Wikipedia's standards.
Gray says teachers need to talk about Wikipedia and how it can be used.
"The purpose of my paper is to start a discussion about it," she said.
INFORMATION:
Get more from the 2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Organized by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences brings together scholars, graduate students, practitioners, and policy-makers to share groundbreaking research and examine the most important social and cultural issues of the day. This year's Congress is co-hosted by the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University and runs from May 28 to June 4.
The Congress program includes original research from across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, providing a great collection of expert sources and innovative story leads. If you are interested in accessing the latest research in the social sciences and humanities, please contact us to be added to our mailing list.
www.congress 2011.ca
For more information or interview requests
Ryan Saxby Hill
rsaxbyhill@fedcan.ca
506-447-3176 (media room)
613-894-7635 (mobile)
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2011-06-01
May 30, 2011 – Fredericton, N.B. – In recent years, the apparent decline in boys' academic success rates has troubled politicians, researchers, and educators. It has been described as an educational crisis and a failure of the traditional school setting. The decline has spurred scores of potential solutions to the problem, including the adoption of same-sex classrooms as a way to better address boys' educational needs.
New research that will be presented at the 2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, New Brunswick, indicates that the picture ...
2011-06-01
In flowering plants, the beginning of embryogenesis is almost exclusively governed by maternal gene activity. Maternal factors regulate the development of the embryo and silence paternal genes during early stages of development. This finding – obtained using next generation sequencing technology – was reported by an international team of researchers including plant geneticists from the University of Zurich. This newly uncovered mechanism may be involved in the maintenance of species boundaries and could play an important role in the development of novel crop varieties. ...
2011-06-01
Excessive noise is not the only thing that causes damage to hearing. In many cases, genetic factors are responsible for the loss of hearing at a young age. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin together with colleagues from Nijmegen have discovered a previously unknown genetic cause of progressive hearing impairment: the disease is caused by mutations of the SMPX (small muscle protein) gene, which is located on the X chromosome. It was not previously known that this gene, which is active in the skeletal muscle and heart, also plays a role ...
2011-06-01
Information technology is now a huge part of the administration of healthcare facilities in the United States. Keeping up with new regulations, payment paradigms, and care delivery models is a daunting but necessary responsibility; providers need help to accomplish this, and there are plenty of IT advisory firms willing to offer assistance.
Providers must consider ARRA funds, Meaningful Use, and the rest of the litany of technology advancements the healthcare industry will demand of them over the next few years. The new KLAS report, "Advisory Services: Navigating ...
2011-06-01
The researchers base their work the fact that climate change has become one of the main problems of the 21st Century, as is demonstrated by numerous studies that confirm the seriousness of its effects. In this sense, similar to what occurs in the area of energy, the issues that are raised regarding its characteristics, extent, and consequences have a decisive effect on public policy and, therefore, on the Law, which is the means of formalizing and enforcing those policies. "In this way, the Law, which has always been called upon to generate confidence and certainty by adequately ...
2011-06-01
A study published in this week's PLoS Medicine suggests that there might be an association between maternal immunization with inactivated influenza vaccine during pregnancy and reduced likelihood of prematurity and the baby being small for gestational age.
The study, led by Saad B. Omer from the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, Georgia, used a large surveillance dataset (the Georgia Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System) to analyze the relationship between receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine during any trimester of pregnancy by mothers ...
2011-06-01
In this week's PLoS Medicine, Anoop Shah of University College London and colleagues report that, in people with stable coronary disease, there were threshold haemoglobin values below which mortality increased in a graded, continuous fashion. As well as a systematic review and statistical analysis of previous studies, the researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of patients from a prospective observational cohort.
Their findings suggest that there are thresholds of haemoglobin that are associated with increased risk of mortality in patients with angina or myocardial ...
2011-06-01
Reporting the findings of a cluster randomized trial carried out in rural Kenya, Beth Kangwana and colleagues find that provision of packs of the malaria therapy artemether-lumefantrine in shops at a subsidized price more than doubled the proportion of children with fever who received drugs promptly. Importantly, whilst enabling cheap and easy purchase of malaria treatment in shops enabled treatment of about 44% of children with fever, this is still much lower than the target of treating 80% of children with fever set by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. So in addition ...
2011-06-01
The influence of "Big Alcohol" in the health arena deserves as much scrutiny as Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, especially in light of evidence of bias in funded research, unsupported claims of benefit, and inappropriate promotion and marketing by the alcohol industry, says a new editorial in this week's PLoS Medicine. The PLoS Medicine editors argue that the statistics about problem drinking are troubling enough, but what also demands more attention and research is the influence of the alcohol industry on health research, government policy, and public perceptions of the harms ...
2011-06-01
Deerfield, IL (May 31, 2011) With recent deadly cholera outbreaks in Haiti and Cameroon providing the latest indication of a menacingly resurgent disease, scientists have discovered rain and temperature fluctuations in at-risk areas could predict epidemics months in advance, according to a new study published today in the June 2011 issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
After analyzing several years of disease and environmental data from cholera-endemic areas of Zanzibar, Tanzania, scientists from the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Wikipedia improves students' work
Students become much more concerned with accuracy when their research is posted online
