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WebQuests are based on the ideas of inquiry, constructivism, and
cooperative and collaborative learning
Why WebQuests? (Tom
March)
If you've attended any professional growth in-services or college
of education courses in the past ten years you'll be familiar with
the following phrases of teacher-speak: critical thinking, cooperative
learning, authentic assessment, and technology integration. You
may even have bumped into cognitive psychology with its schema theory,
scaffolding, and novice/expert models. How about constructivism?
If you're like most educators, you get excited about new ideas for
helping students learn and grow, but then feel your chest tighten
or your spirits sink when you remember your already bursting curriculum
requirements and the logistical demands of classroom teaching. With
everything else that must be taught, how can we add these new and
important strategies? WebQuests were designed to address this dilemma
by bringing together the most effective instructional practices
into one integrated student activity.
Student Motivation & Authenticity
When students are motivated they
not only put in more effort, but their minds are more alert and
ready to make connections. WebQuests use several strategies to increase
student motivation. First, WebQuests use a central question that
honestly needs answering. When students are asked to understand,
hypothesize or problem-solve an issue that confronts the real world,
they face an authentic task, not something that only carries meaning
in a school classroom. Although you can't count on getting a response,
when students do receive feedback from someone they didn't previously
know, they join a community of learners and have their presence,
if not their contribution, validated. When teachers choose a topic
they know their students would respond to, they add to the relevance.
The second feature of WebQuests that
increase student motivation is that students are given real resources
to work with. Rather than turn to a dated textbook, filtered encyclopedias
or middle-of-the-road magazines, with the Web students can directly
access individual experts, searchable databases, current reporting,
and even fringe groups to gather their insights.
When students take on roles within
a cooperative group, they must develop expertise on a particular
aspect or perspective of the topic. That their teammates count on
them to bring back real expertise should inspire and motivate learning.
Lastly, the answer or solution the
student teams develop can be posted, emailed or presented to real
people for feedback and evaluation. This authentic assessment also
motivates students to do their best and come up with a real group
answer, not simply something to fulfill an assignment.
Developing Thinking Skills
One of the main (and often neglected) features of any WebQuest is
that students tackle questions that prompt higher level thinking.
Certainly, the Web can be used as a source for simple information
retrieval, but this misses its power and short-changes students.
Built into the WebQuest process are the strategies of cognitive
psychology and constructivism. First, the question posed to students
can not be answered simply by collecting and spitting back information.
A WebQuest forces students to transform information into something
else: a cluster that maps out the main issues, a comparison, a hypothesis,
a solution, etc.
In order to engage students in higher
level cognition, WebQuests use scaffolding or prompting which has
been shown to facilitate more advanced thinking. In other words,
by breaking the task into meaningful "chunks" and asking
students to undertake specific sub-tasks, a WebQuest can step them
through the kind of thinking process that more expert learners would
typically use.
Constructivism
Constructivism suggests that when students need to understand a
more complex or sophisticated topic like those that comprise WebQuests,
it doesn't help to serve them simplified truths, boiled down examples,
or step-by-step formulas. What they need are many examples with
lots of information and opinions on the topic through which they
will sift until they have constructed an understanding that not
only connects to their own individual prior knowledge, but also
builds new schema that will be refined when students encounter the
topic again in the future. Until the Web, this kind of activity
was very difficult for the average teacher to create because collecting
such a breadth of resources was next to impossible.
Cooperative Learning
In WebQuests students take on roles within a small student group
and this tends to promote motivation. In addition, because the WebQuest
targets learning about large, complex or controversial topics, it's
probably not realistic to expect each student to master all of its
aspects. Thus learners divide to conquer. This is not to say that
students don't gain the overall understanding, because this happens
in a later stage of the process, but it does suggest to learners
the reality that not everyone knows everything. In fact, this is
one of the great messages that students invariably bring back from
interactions with experts whose works focus on very thin slivers
of the knowledge pie. Having students develop expertise and be appreciated
for it by their peers is built into each WebQuest. Cooperative learning
strategies are then applied to necessitate each student's input.
By running several WebQuest groups in the same class, students will
also see that different solutions were chosen by each team because
of the quality of the group members' research and argumentation
skills. As students complete more WebQuests they will become increasingly
aware that their individual work has a direct impact of the intelligence
of their group's final product.
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Module
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