Webquesting? Then Scaffold and Choose Wisely

On a recent mission to incorporate American Memory and PowerPoint as part of a 4th grade webquest, I though I would browse the literature on the subject. First of all, I was surprised at how few results were returned when entering the keyword “webquest” in the NClive database. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that there were about 72 hits. Just out of curiosity, I tried the ERIC database and only got 74. Considering that the webquest has been around since ’95, there has apparently been very little written in the major media sources on the topic and the academic journals. As a student in a Masters program in Educational Technology, this was even alarming. Typically, instructional delivery models are frequently studied and evaluated, but there has been very little concrete research on this topic. I was, however, fortunate enough to find in the NClive database an article from an excellent source called the Journal of Research on Technology in Education published by the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), famed for the NETS standards that are used widely in schools and teacher education programs

The journal article, appropriately enough, was a study of how tasks should be structured in a webquest to provide an appropriate level of scaffolding and how to select web resources to support WebQuest learning experiences. One of the data sources used in this study was PowerPoint presentations created by students during their WebQuest that were scored by rubrics incorporated into the quest. In a preliminary study, researchers found that students who were given more specific procedures for completing their task, in this case a brochure, acquired more “community knowledge”, were more likely to produce a higher quality product, and were less likely to click external links that led to site other than those designated in the WebQuest. Using results form the previous study, the researchers incorporated concept map as a part of the WebQuest in addition to the explicit instruction laid out in the process part of the quest. The researchers found that providing students with a concept map to record information found from websites they visited helped them to better extract, remember, organize and present the information they found. In addition, that students preferred sites that were simple, organized, contained multimedia elements, contained few menus, and were not “too wordy”. Finally the researchers concluded that conceptual scaffolds such as study guide to help students identify the appropriate information and concept maps that helped them organize it supported students “as they were engaged in learner centered, resource-based learning.”

In the literature review, the researches mentioned some finding from prior studies of the unexpected difficulty in implementing a webquest (despite following the structure design laid out by Dodge), specifically in the amount of teacher support that was still required despite their best efforts to design a WebQuest with well laid out guidelines. This and the results of their study suggest that my WebQuest will require a lot of planning, carefully chosen sites, and a lot of scaffolding during the process part of the quest. Apparently, designing and effective webquest in not as easy as it seems.

MacGregor, S. K., & Lou, Y. (2005). Web-Based Learning: How Task Scaffolding and Web Site Design Support Knowledge Aqcuisition. Journal of Research on Technology in Education , 37 (2), 161-175.

Web Based Learning