Scaffolding strategies for supporting middle school students’ online inquiry processes

Abstract

Online inquiry, use of the Web as an information resource to inquire into science, has become increasingly common in middle schools in recent years. However, prior research has found that middle school students tend to use the Web in a superficial manner. To address the challenges that students face in online inquiry, we designed the Digital IdeaKeeper, a scaffolded software tool to help students engage in online inquiry through support for inquiry planning, information search, analysis, and synthesis. This study examined the differences between regular and IdeaKeeper-supported online inquiry performed by 8 pairs of sixth graders in naturalistic classroom settings. Analysis of 80 screen videos of students’ computer activities and conversations found that IdeaKeeper-supported online inquiry was more integrated, efficient, continuous, metacognitive, and focused. This study has important implications for designing online learning environments for middle school students.

Introduction

The use of computers and the Internet in K-12 schools has increased rapidly in the last decade. As of 2005, nearly all public schools in the United States had access to the Internet (Wells & Lewis, 2006). As a result of easy access to and abundance of online resources, the Web has been widely used by teachers and students in recent years (Hoffman et al., 2003, Kuiper et al., 2005, Wallace et al., 2000). For example, in a national survey that involved 140,000 secondary students, 67% of students reported that they would search on the Web first for their school work, with only 10% indicating that they would find a book in a library (NetDay, 2004).

Although Web resources provide valuable learning opportunities, easy access does not ensure learning. The complexity of handling vast volume of resources with varying validity in a distractive environment may overwhelm K-12 students (Kuiper, Volman, & Terwel, 2009). Effective use of online resources requires sophisticated cognitive and metacognitive skills. However, students often lack these skills to use the Web as an information resource effectively in their science inquiry (Hill and Hannafin, 1997, Hoffman et al., 2003, Wallace et al., 2000), or what we describe as “online inquiry” in this paper. Online inquiry involves a set of interconnected processes, including generating a scientific question called driving question, searching for information on the Web, evaluating and making sense of online information, and integrating different pieces of information to answer the driving question (Quintana, Zhang, & Krajcik, 2005). In particular, prior research has identified three typical problems in students’ online inquiry.

The first problem that learners face is superficial engagement with content. Wallace et al. (2000) studied sixth graders’ use of online resources and found these students demonstrated naïve task understanding and poor process management in online inquiry. They tended to simplify their task to one of finding a correct answer on the Web, rather than a sense-making process. Thus, they often quickly skimmed webpages to locate what they thought could be a single ready-made answer to their question, but made little effort to read for understanding. Similarly, Kuiper et al. (2009) studied fifth grade students’ online behaviors and found online reading was a “bottleneck” for the students due to their lack of patience.

Students may appear very busy during their online time, but their “busyness” does not necessarily equate engagement with content learning. For example, Wallace et al. (2000) observed that “[Students] repeated the same search, failed to look at search results even when they reduced the number to something manageable, and generally seemed to be engaged in staying busy, not in looking for anything useful” (p. 96). Thus, a deep analysis of how students engage in different online inquiry activities and how to promote student engagement with content is needed.

The second problem is inefficiency in online inquiry caused by disorientation (Dias, Gomes, & Correia, 1999), distraction (Ruthven, Hennessy, & Deaney, 2005), poor search skills (Kuiper et al., 2009), and mechanical tasks such as recording URLs and keywords (Wallace et al., 2000). Ruthven et al. (2005) found that secondary students in their study were easily distracted by online advertisements. In inefficient online inquiry, students get a task done with unnecessarily more time and effort or waste time and effort in irrelevant tasks. For example, manual recording of URLs and keywords is less efficient than automated recording. Time on advertisements is wasted. The inefficiency problem contributes to the first problem of superficial engagement with content. When students are occupied by mechanical tasks or distracted by irrelevant pictures, they have less time to engage in content learning.

The third problem is poor self-regulation in online learning. According to Zimmerman (2002), “Self-regulation refers to self-generated thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are oriented to attaining goals” (p. 65). In other words, self-regulated learners are goal-oriented. They set out goals and choose strategies to attain goals before their efforts to learn, and pay close attention to their progress towards goals during the learning processes (Zimmerman, 2002). Proactive planning and close self-monitoring are key characteristics of self-regulated learners.

Unfortunately, prior research has shown that students rarely plan their online inquiry or monitor their progress when searching for information on the Web (Brand-Gruwel et al., 2009, Greene and Land, 2000). In a study of middle school students’ use of online resources in a historical inquiry task, Li and Lim (2008) noted “They read the task hastily and then went online. When they found anything related to the topic, they copied and pasted it… They showed little planning before searching and little revision after pasting the information” (p. 1401). Similarly, Kuiper et al. (2009) observed impulsiveness in fifth graders’ online inquiry, in which most students did not plan before searching. In addition, an online inquiry project often lasts several days, but students have difficulty keeping track of their work from day to day (Zhang, Marx, & Quintana, 2004). To make matters worse, teachers have great difficulty monitoring students’ work and providing support to individual students in an online learning environment (Hwang et al., 2008, Wallace, 2004).

Despite the challenges that students face in online learning, limited efforts have been made to design and study innovations to help students overcome the challenges. Besides the studies aforementioned, other research has mainly focused on understanding students’ search and navigational patterns (Dimopoulos and Asimakopoulos, 2010, Tu et al., 2008, Willoughby et al., 2009), evaluation of websites (Bos, 2000, Brem et al., 2001, Walraven et al., 2009), students’ beliefs about and attitudes towards learning from online resources (Duggan et al., 2001, Ng and Gunstone, 2002), role of individual differences in domain knowledge, search expertise, and interest (MaKinster, Beghetto, & Plucker, 2002), and features of webpages that support learning (Kember, McNaught, Chong, Lam, & Cheng, 2010).

In addition, a few efforts have been made to support the use of Web resources in classrooms. For example, Hwang et al. (2008) designed a tool called Meta-Analyzer to help teachers keep track of students’ online search behaviors. Lee (2005) developed VisSearch, a tool to help students visualize their search results in a concept map. Li and Lim (2008) explored how to use scaffolded instruction, including written prompts, argumentation template, questioning and modeling, to support students’ online historical inquiry.

Together these studies made important contributions to understanding the nature of online inquiry and ways to support it. Nonetheless, few studies have explored technology-based scaffolding strategies to support middle school students in online inquiry. Middle school students have greater needs for support than do high school and college students due to the lack of cognitive and metacognitive skills needed for online inquiry. Moreover, much of prior research occurred in an experimental setting, in which the researchers designed the information-seeking tasks for users to carry out in a short period of time, usually within 10–20 min. However, as Kim and Hannafin (2011) noted, “little research has focused on scaffolding learning in real-world, everyday classroom settings” (p. 403). Kuiper et al. (2005) recommended that “future research must focus on the design of learning environments in which the use of the Web as an information resource is incorporated into a curriculum context” (p. 311). Our study aimed to fill in the gap to examine how to scaffold students’ online learning in authentic classroom settings.