An encyclopedia is a reference text in print or electronic form and is normally organised alphabetically. (Some encyclopedias for young children are organised thematically.) General encyclope-dias for adults (The Encyclopedia Britannica for example) can be huge, scholarly works with a large number of entries spanning every possible subject written by leading experts and arranged in many volumes or on huge computer databases. Here we are concerned with encyclopedias for children – how we choose encyclopedias from the many on the market and how we help children of different ages use them.
General criteria for choosing an encyclopedia would include being up to date and accurate, well written and illustrated and with a content of interest and use to a particular age group. But the very best encyclopedias have some other qualities. They manage to put across the idea that knowledge is not static but expands: astronomers discover new stars and palaeontologists find new kinds of dinosaurs. Often such discoveries are more than a superficial addition to what we know; one dinosaur fossil recently unearthed suggested that some of these creatures, far from being the green or brown we usually picture, were bright red and orange. Not only does this lead us to picturing the creatures differently, it also makes us think in a new way about camouflage and predators. Further, our attitudes to what is known change. Stephanie Harvey notes that the great contribution of Native Peoples to the development of the American West has transformed encyclopedia entries on this topic (Harvey, 1998). So a good encyclopedia explains knowledge that seems fairly secure while giving the impression that there is still much to be discovered and thought about. This welcome speculative approach can be a feature of encyclopedias for the very young. Angela Wilkes, in Your World: A First Encyclopedia (Kingfisher), shares some theories about how dinosaurs became extinct with her young readers and makes it clear that ‘No one knows exactly why’.
Another quality we look for is a capacity to draw a young learner, whether browsing or researching, easily into a particular field of knowledge. Good illustrations are most important. Sixty per cent of the 175 seven to eleven year olds taking part in the Exeter Encyclopedia project said they looked at photographs, maps and drawings first, mentioning particularly entries on muscles, places, plants, lakes, events, sharks, World War II and Henry VIII. CD-ROM encyclopedias have strong potential for developing children’s visual literacy. The Britannica 2007 Children’s Encyclopaedia is in a CD-ROM (PC/MAC) form, which reviewers found easy to navigate and to have amusing and informative graphics and film. Older primary children also find the visual aspect of both Eyewitness Children’s Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley) and Earth Quest (an initiative by Dorling Kindserley with the National History Museum) appealing. The second of these explains and demonstrates the movement of tectonic plates, erupting volcanoes and destroying earthquakes. The written text in both print and electronic encyclopedias also has to inspire. The first part of a lively entry on ‘Storms’ in Dorling Kindersley’s Children’s Illustrated Encyclopedia puts the phenomena in an interesting perspective:
About 2,000 thunderstorms are raging throughout the world at this very moment, and lightning has struck about 500 times since you began reading this page. Storms have enormous power: the energy in a hurricane could illuminate more light bulbs than there are in the United States.
This is a long way from the impersonal language of older encyclopedias whether for adults or children. We know an encyclopedia has succeeded if children want to carry their researches into other books.
Valuable as browsing is – savouring the illustrations and dipping into the text – children also use encyclopedias to find specific information or as a first port of call when beginning a new topic. There are important issues about how we support children’s use of reference books. Getting the best out of an encyclopedia can be a complicated matter. Even the older primary children in the Exeter Encyclopedia Project had difficulty with the index volume of a multi-volume set of children’s encyclopedias (Wragg, 2000). So some direct teaching about retrieval devices is needed.
Teachers can best help very young children understand about head words and indexes in the context of an interesting task. Five year olds learning about ‘Whales’ were eager to consult reference books for a much older age group alongside their teacher to find the answers to their questions (Doyle and Mallett, 1994). The ‘Whale’ work case study shows us that the desire to find out – children’s sometimes passionate curiosity about something in particular – supplies the energy and will to learn about ‘looking up’ procedures. Older children often have time-tabled sessions in the library to learn about library and study skills. However well intentioned, too many ‘looking up’ exercises outside a context to give them point and meaning can become dreary. This does not rule out times when teachers and librarians can help children understand the organisation of reference books and how to carry out searches in both print encyclopedias and electronic search systems.
Whether children are using electronic or print encyclopedias, the important thing is how they use the information they find: perhaps to help them debate an issue in class discussion or to make notes towards a piece of writing which will be further enriched by what is found in other books. Margaret Meek reminds us that children are never too young to read critically and to have opinions about which texts have been most helpful (Meek, 1996).
Doyle, Kathleen and Mallett, Margaret (1994) ‘Were dinosaurs bigger than whales?’ TACTYC Early Years Journal, 14 (2) Spring.
Earth Quest Dorling Kindersley/Natural History Museum (CD-ROM) (goes beyond superficial information for children who love science).
Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta (both comprehensive encyclopedias for teachers’ use with a good search engine).
Eyewitness Children’s Encyclopedia Dorling Kindersley. (This provides an array of multimedia navigation systems and it links to Dorling Kindersley’s Internet site. It has a talking dictionary. Children can easily print screens.)
Harvey, Stephanie (1998) Non-fiction Matters: Reading, Writing and Research in Grades 3–8. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers (see Chapter 8).
Mallett, Margaret (1999) Young Researchers London: Routledge.
Meek, Margaret (1996) ‘The quick fix: reference books’ in Information and Book Learning Stroud: The Thimble Press.
Wragg, Ted (2000) ‘Obscure Reference’ article in the Times Educational Supplement about The Exeter Encyclopedia project. (Funded by Encyclopedia Britannica, this study involved observing the strategies of 175 seven to eleven year olds, from five rural and five urban primary schools in the Midlands and South, as they carried out tasks using encyclopedias.)
