Access Denied: How Internet Filters Impact Student Learning in High Schools By Lynn Sutton

Access Denied: How Internet Filters Impact Student Learning in H ...

Chapter 2:

Framing the question: A review of the relevant literature

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(2003) believed that the study’s findings indicated that filters, when operated at their least restrictive setting, posed only a minor impediment to searching for health information. Thus, the level of filter settings can be identified as a key element in the overall effectiveness of a filtering program. Haycock (2001) reports,

The level of satisfaction with the software and vendor was very much dependent on whether the program tended to block too much or too little, whether the filtering was done on-site or off-site, and whether the teacher-librarian had any control and ability to override the system. (p. 241)

The 2003 study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Online Policy Group is critical of the effectiveness of filters in educational institutions, as might be expected from unabashed civil rights organizations. They carried out their study because “no organization has studied effectively and quantitatively the issue of student Internet access within public schools that operate Internet blocking software” (p. 3). Their methodology involved selecting topics from the mandated curricula of three states, generating search strings from the topics, recording up to 50 Web pages that resulted from these search strings, and then testing the Web pages against Internet blocking software (filters). After testing nearly one million Web pages, one of their key findings states:

Schools that implement Internet blocking software even with the least restrictive settings will block at a minimum tens of thousands of Web pages inappropriately, either because the Web pages are miscategorized or because the Web pages, while correctly categorized, do not merit blocking. (p. 25)

The study portrays the effect of filtering on students in this way: “biases and mistakes inherent in Internet blocking software reduce the student’s