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GORDON ELDRIDGE: LESSONS IN LEARNING

Learning from Internet Sources

By Gordon Eldridge, TIE Columnist
03-Dec-14


Reliance on the World Wide Web as a source of information is a trend that is increasing both in and out of school, and this means our students need to be equipped to make the best use of the information they find on the Web.
To do this, they need to develop skills related to evaluating information and to synthesizing information across multiple sources. But what exactly do these skills look like when used in the context of internet research?
A recent research project involving researchers from three different universities sought to determine how effective Web users employ these skills when engaged in real research.
As part of the research, 34 university students participated in a think-aloud protocol, which helped the researchers track what the students were thinking about and focusing on as they researched. The research topic involved students in preparing to write on the topic “What caused the eruption of Mt. St. Helens volcano?”
Students were given a sheltered search environment that had been constructed to deliberately include reliable and unreliable sites. To ensure that prior knowledge did not influence the way students conducted their research, the students were chosen based on having met the criterion of low levels of knowledge of tectonic plates and the causes of volcanic eruptions on a pre-test.
After conducting the research, in addition to the writing prompt, students were also given a post-test on their understanding of the causes of volcanic eruptions. Based on the difference between pre-test and post-test results, 10 students were identified as better learners (meaning their scores had increased by between 4 and 8 correct responses out of 20), and 11 poorer learners were identified (meaning that their scores had either not increased or had decreased).
The think-aloud protocols of these two groups were compared to identify differences in the ways they went about their research. The think-aloud protocols were then coded, using the following categories:
1. Repetition/paraphrase: restating the gist of a chunk of text without adding anything new.
2. Self-explanation: reasoning about a chunk of text by connecting it to prior understanding or other information, elaborating on it or interpreting it.
3. Surface connection: vaguely connecting to information read previously (e.g. “I heard that somewhere before”).
4. Irrelevant association: making connections not relevant to the task.
5. Prediction: stating what the reader expects to find out next in the text.
6. Monitoring: ongoing monitoring of comprehension and emerging understanding.
7. Information/source evaluation: making judgments about relevance, credibility etc.
8. Navigation: describing where the learner intends to go next with their research, and why
What were the results?
• All learners demonstrated more processing events on reliable web pages than on unreliable ones, but the difference was greater for the better learners.
• More self-explanations were generated by all learners on reliable sites than on unreliable ones. However, whereas the two groups did not differ on the proportion of self-explanations used on unreliable sites, the better learners used significantly more self-explanations on the reliable sites than the poorer learners.
• The proportions of paraphrasing events were similar for better and poorer learners across both reliable and unreliable sites.
• More monitoring comments were made by better learners than poorer learners on reliable sites, but not on unreliable sites.
• Overall, the better learners invested a greater percentage of their sense-making efforts (as evidenced by behaviors such as self-explanation and monitoring) on information found on the reliable sites. The poorer learners seemed to work just as hard at understanding the unreliable sites as the reliable ones.
• There was no noticeable difference between the two groups for activities such as paraphrasing, which relate more to establishing the literal meaning of the text than to making sense of it.
So just how did it come about that the better learners were able to invest more of their time and effort in sense-making in the reliable sites? As mentioned earlier, this did not result from greater prior understanding, as all participants had demonstrated limited prior knowledge of the causes of volcanic eruptions. It also did not result from a systematic evaluation of the credibility of the sources.
There were very few instances of explicit evaluation of the credibility of a source using details about the author or publisher of a website by either group. Rather, evaluations of the scientific soundness of information emerged from the processes of meaning-making.
The key seems to be not so much that the better learners made use of different reading strategies, but that they used the strategies in connected ways and practiced them to a greater depth.
The study showed that:
• Better learners were able to monitor their own, ongoing understanding and evaluate the extent to which new information was contributing to this.
• This monitoring of understanding allowed them to set interim goals to establish what they still needed to learn in order to further their understanding and complete the task.
• These interim goals drove their use of self-explanation as a means of building new information into their ongoing understanding.
• Navigation decisions about whether to continue reading or leave a page were also based on these goals. By contrast, poorer learners tended to have less concrete reasons for their navigation decisions.
The final result was that at least half of the better learners, but only one of the poorer learners, produced essays that integrated multiple causal factors to explain the Mt. St. Helens eruption. It appears that the combination of self-explanation and monitoring was what allowed them to put all the pieces together into an integrated understanding.
The researchers noted that monitoring in the absence of self-explanation tended to produce very superficial comments such as “I get that,” and did not lead to the planning of next steps.
What might this mean for our classrooms?
So how can we help our learners approach research in the strategic ways that the better learners in this study demonstrated?
Our students need to use self-explanation and monitoring of understanding in connected ways and make use of the results of these processes to inform their evaluations of information and their planning and navigation decisions during research.
It is important to introduce specific reading strategies to learners, to model these, and provide practice and feedback. It is also essential, however, to move beyond practicing strategies in relative isolation.
We need to model the use of these strategies in integrated situations, once again giving students opportunities to practice this and receive feedback on the way they are connecting the strategies into an integrated, goal-directed research process.
Reference
Goldman, S., Braasch, J., Wiley, J., Graesser, A. & Brodowinska, K. (2012) “Comprehending and Learning from Internet Sources: Processing Patterns of Better and Poorer Learners” in Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), pp. 356-381.




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