The four strands of study for ICT: Finding information

What is important about Finding information?

The ability to find likely sources of relevant information empowers a pupil who is working independently. But finding the sources is just the start. The wealth of material now available on CD-ROM and the internet can be daunting. There is little mediation – people have access to information through computers in homes, shopping centres, libraries and internet cafés, and through digital television and mobile phones.

This strand is about understanding what makes information, and about motivating enquiry and making pupils' independent study more focused and productive. Pupils need to learn:

• how to access information from a wide variety of sources, including large data sets
• to recognise the origin of information and to judge its accuracy, validity and possible bias
• to assess how useful and relevant a source of information and its contents are for a particular enquiry or piece of research.

The strand also addresses how to use ICT to draw conclusions from collected data, and in particular how pupils might:

• identify exactly what information is required to solve a problem, complete a task or answer a question
• assess the value and validity of what they read, see and hear
• find, collect and store data efficiently, and use data appropriately to draw conclusions based on evidence.

The topic of this strand is one that most subjects in the curriculum draw on and, by its nature, the strand reinforces pupils' literacy and numeracy skills.

Finding information has three substrands in the ICT Framework, which are:

• 1.1 Using data and information sources
• 1.2 Searching and selecting
• 1.3 Organising and investigating.