Information skills are vital, says Barbara Ball, but can they be taught on their own?

This photocopiable res-ource book is part of the Infoskills series, which aims to help teach information skills in secondary schools. The whole course sets out to take pupils “from simple alphabetical and numerical ordering right through to the referencing and problem-solving skills involved in researching a project and accessing IT systems”.

Data Handling concentrates on numerical skills, graphical skills and the interpretation of diagrams, plans and maps. Its success depends on the viability of teaching these skills in isolation. There is much debate about whether the IT skills related to the use of word processors, spreadsheets and databases are best taught in an IT lesson or in subject-based lessons when the use of IT is appropriate. This debate is relevant here.

The book consists of 59 short activities, most of which are free-standing worksheets which pupils fill in. The activities are similar to those which pupils are likely to meet in their mathematics or geography lessons: pie charts, using a calendar, drawing plans to scale, grid references. This suggests that these are relevant and useful activities for young people.

However, an approach such as this inevitably concentrates on the skills themselves rather than on any purpose for learning them. Pupils might well ask why they are answering the questions. One of the activities, Ages and Reigns, invites pupils to use an encyclopedia to answer 15 questions which include: “Hector Berlioz and Georges Bizet were both French composers. Who was the eldest?” (sic) and “How old was the Emperor Hadrian when the town of Pompeii was destroyed by a volcano?” The lack of coherence reduces this activity to a meaningless time-filler. Pupils might just as well be playing Trivial Pursuit. The worksheet is made even worse by its attempt to explain how the answers can be worked out: it imposes one of the traditional algorithms for subtraction, which might not be familiar to pupils and is in any case not the most natural way to perform the calculations in this context.

The book does not ignore calculators. One activity invites pupils to use calculators to work with whole numbers, decimals, square roots and percentages. It is perhaps naive to believe that such a large chunk of mathematics can be mastered by working on one short worksheet; indeed this worksheet could easily have the effect of confusing pupils’ understanding of these mathematical concepts.

Pupils will be confused if they tackle the activity Interpreting Survey Data, in which we are told that we find the overall percentage of the population voting Conservative by adding up and dividing by four the percentage figures for each of the age groups 18-25, 26-35, 36-45 and 46+, as if it were safe to assume that there were equal numbers of people in each of these age groups. This is an elementary blunder in interpreting data.

The introduction says that the material provides “a wealth of free-standing lesson opportunities for supply teachers and staff covering for absent colleagues”. So if you want to keep a class quiet for an hour, and not worry too much about what they learn, this might be a useful resource. It is produced and researched sufficiently well to occupy a class without causing them too much damage.

Barbara Ball is assistant principal at Longslade Community College, Birstall, Leicester. The other books in the series, Accessing Written Information, Library and Research Skills and Skills for Life will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue.