Access to the Internet has opened up a huge range of opportunities for school children. However, it has also made the task of finding and selecting suitable information resources significantly more difficult. This paper reports some of the findings of the first year of a three-year AHRB-funded project: "Education for evidence-based citizenship: improving pupils' information seeking skills", which began in November 2001. Amongst other things, the project aims 1. to discover what teachers and students perceive to be the key issues in using the Internet; 2. to determine the extent to which those perceptions affect students' information-seeking practice, to discover what teachers and students perceive to be the key issues in using the Internet; 3. to provide insights into what information sources students are using and the context in which they are being used. The paper provides a background to the talk being given at the conference, which will deal with implications for teaching practice. The project is being carried out jointly between the Department of Information Studies at Sheffield University and The City School in Sheffield. The City School is a comprehensive school comprising 1500 students. It is a mixed community school in an economically deprived area of the city; it is, however, well provided with ICT resources. School staff therefore, have an unusual breadth of experience in using the Internet and implementing it in their teaching.
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